Need Help with a Backup Solution

Moderators: jhartley, MSR734, nola

Need Help with a Backup Solution

Post by shuman » Fri Oct 26, 2012 4:40 pm

Up until recently I have just used Timemachine to handle backups. I've played around with ZFS but never in a capacity that required backups of ZFS.

Previously:
Onsite: rsync everything from my mac mini (1 drive, 1 partition) to a raidz a few times a day.
Offsite: Every 2-4 weeks bring a hard drive home from work, allow time machine to do backups overnight, then take the drive back to work.

This was a very simple solution that took very little effort. Now I'm faced with multiple drives with multiple filesystems *probably should have planned this BEFORE! ;) *

Backup hardware plan:
3, 1TB drives pooled for onsite
1, 3TB for offsite

My current configuration:
Code: Select all
Chriss-Mac-mini:~ chris$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Lion                    499.2 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk3
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *3.0 TB     disk3
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk3s1
   2:                        ZFS                         3.0 TB     disk3s2
/dev/disk4
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *3.0 TB     disk4
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk4s1
   2:                        ZFS                         3.0 TB     disk4s2
/dev/disk5
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:             zfs_pool_proxy zdata                  *3.0 TB     disk5
   1:       zfs_filesystem_proxy Backups                 1.4 TB     disk5s1
   2:       zfs_filesystem_proxy Lion                    1.5 TB     disk5s1s1
   3:       zfs_filesystem_proxy Storage                 1.4 TB     disk5s2
   4:       zfs_filesystem_proxy Users                   1.4 TB     disk5s3
   5:       zfs_filesystem_proxy anika                   1.4 TB     disk5s3s1
   6:       zfs_filesystem_proxy chris                   1.8 TB     disk5s3s2
   7:       zfs_filesystem_proxy jaren                   1.4 TB     disk5s3s3
   8:       zfs_filesystem_proxy severin                 1.4 TB     disk5s3s4
   9:       zfs_filesystem_proxy Videos                  2.4 TB     disk5s4


Can I please get some input on solutions for backing up both the OS drive as well as the ZFS drives?

Thanks,

Chris
- Mac Mini (Late 2012), 10.8.5, 16GB memory, pool - 2 Mirrored 3TB USB 3.0 External Drives
shuman Offline

User avatar
 
Posts: 96
Joined: Mon Sep 17, 2012 8:15 am

Re: Need Help with a Backup Solution

Post by /dev/null » Sat Oct 27, 2012 4:21 am

I have nothing that important on my osx ssd (250 GB, 202 GB free). Once a day i put my Time Machine HDD (attached via USB 3) on; once a week i duplicate the whole SSD using Carbon Copy Cloner (rsync with a fancy gui) to a bootable 2,5“ disk using an usb3 docking station. This disk is kept the rest of the week in my company. So if my SSD crashes, i loose max 1 day of Internet History in Safari … if my house burns, i lost 1 week of Internet History in Safari. If someone starts a nuclear war with my country .. i am fu**ed up :-p

For my raidz1 … wrote a php script which automatically creates every day a snapshot and keeps the last 14 days, 6 weeks, 12 months, 4 quarters and every year. And every weekend i copy the whole raid to an external drive using CCC. Normally around 10-40 gb of changed data to copy, so it just took a few mins scanning the drive for changes and copy changed stuff. This one is kept at my company, too.

My NAS … running raid 1 and stores nothing that is important. Wrote a php script which runs once a day and mails a textual representation of all folders and their content to my spam box. So, if the nas crashes, i’ve at least an idea, what i’ve lost. Stuff like Smartmontools check the drives health multiple times a day and would send me an SMS, if something goes wrong. But there is nothing important on it, would i couldn’t get back within a few hours.

And my sheevyplug home server - creates every day a true crypt container and copies my repositories and other important stuff in that container and uploads it to amazon s3. Sometimes i remove old stuff @s3 manually; does'nt 've automated this yet. So at least /var/intranet, /var/extranet/, /var/svn, /var/mysql, /var/ssl/ and even my bug tracker issues would survive the war…

Hardware of other familiy members ... the kids knows everything better, anyway (hope they re right with their backup strategy, too) :-p
/dev/null Offline


 
Posts: 16
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2012 7:13 am

Re: Need Help with a Backup Solution

Post by shuman » Sun Oct 28, 2012 5:16 pm

Your post reminded me of a couple of things. If something catastrophic happens, the OS and apps are easily replaced and in fact, I would probably rather do a clean install anyway. This gets me back to just doing offsite on the zfs stuff (user files). Maybe for the onsite I could continue to back up the system data as well.

Maybe we could all do a Google+ hangout sometime to discuss these things. I've never "really" done one so it might be interesting.
- Mac Mini (Late 2012), 10.8.5, 16GB memory, pool - 2 Mirrored 3TB USB 3.0 External Drives
shuman Offline

User avatar
 
Posts: 96
Joined: Mon Sep 17, 2012 8:15 am

Re: Need Help with a Backup Solution

Post by grahamperrin » Mon Oct 29, 2012 3:15 am

shuman wrote:… Maybe we could all do a Google+ hangout … 


Defocusing from backups, chat in general is good … other places to discuss ZFS and ZEVO
grahamperrin Offline

User avatar
 
Posts: 1596
Joined: Fri Sep 14, 2012 10:21 pm
Location: Brighton and Hove, United Kingdom

Amazon S3, Glacier and EBS; Backblaze

Post by grahamperrin » Mon Oct 29, 2012 4:59 pm

Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier

/dev/null wrote:… my sheevyplug home server - creates every day a true crypt container and copies my repositories and other important stuff in that container and uploads it to amazon s3.


I bookmarked the Wikipedia page for Amazon S3 at a time (in 2009) when it stated "… no guarantee that customer data will not be lost. …". Whether that was a fair statement, I don't know; the current edition of the page doesn't mention guarantees. In Talk for the page there's a link to the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement.

More recently there's Amazon Glacier,

… an extremely low-cost storage service that provides secure and durable storage for data archiving and backup. In order to keep costs low, Amazon Glacier is optimized for data that is infrequently accessed and for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable.

… designed with the expectation that retrievals are infrequent and unusual, and data will be stored for extended periods of time. You can retrieve up to 5% of your average monthly storage (pro-rated daily) for free each month. If you choose to retrieve more than this amount of data in a month, you are charged a retrieval fee starting at $0.011 per gigabyte. …


Other Amazon stuff with ZFS

Off-topic from backup but maybe of interest to people who use Amazon with ZFS, the other day in IRC:

… had an EC2 instance with a non-root pool built on an instance storage volume and an EBS volume.  the configuration was simple stripe/concat. the EC2 instance is degraded and Amazon is going to shut it down. wants to move the data, but the pool is unusable due to the EBS volume being unable to attach to the system however, the EBS volume is functional and may be attached to another system, the question is how to get the other half of …


– and somewhere in the conversation was a link to http://pastebin.com/VAM1jeSC

Backblaze

http://www.backblaze.com – $3.96 a month for 2 years ($95 total)

… a highly efficient storage system that enables us to optimize how we store data. …


Many other backup services exist. I learnt of Backblaze whilst learning about ZFS (dedup etc.) a few months ago.

Decisions

I haven't decided whether to go with Amazon Glacier or Backblaze. Decision is long overdue. I might begin a free trial of Backblaze soon.
grahamperrin Offline

User avatar
 
Posts: 1596
Joined: Fri Sep 14, 2012 10:21 pm
Location: Brighton and Hove, United Kingdom

rsync, Carbon Copy Cloner, bandwidth and performance

Post by grahamperrin » Sun Nov 11, 2012 4:12 am

Originally posted 2012-09-22, moved from viewtopic.php?p=276#p276 under Slow reads and writes:

Jimbo wrote:… rsync … Issuing commands against zfs or zpool stall for ages before completing. If I kill the rsync, they're ok. …


OK. That rings a bell. A few months ago I occasionally used Carbon Copy Cloner, which includes a version of rsync, for backups of my JHFS+ startup volume, to ZEVO. MacBookPro5,2 with 8 GB memory, devices on FireWire and USB but no USB3, and (back then) a horrendously large number of files and directories on the startup volume. From what I recall:

  • an initial backup might perform well, and have minimal impact on overall performance of the system
  • incremental backups were extraordinarily time-consuming, with apparently negative impacts on other uses of the system; so bad that I usually chose to cancel the backup before CCC had evaluated what was to be backed up

– YMMV (and this is not a criticism of CCC; I never found time to report my findings to the developer).

Without digging for evidence, I suspect that some uses of rsync or CCC can be unexpectedly hungry in terms of UBC (unified buffer cache) and so on.
grahamperrin Offline

User avatar
 
Posts: 1596
Joined: Fri Sep 14, 2012 10:21 pm
Location: Brighton and Hove, United Kingdom

Re: Need Help with a Backup Solution

Post by /dev/null » Sun Nov 11, 2012 5:28 am

CCC: HFS+ to HFS+ (boot Disk)

Anzahl der Ordner: 140.758 (number of folders)
Anzahl der Dateien: 795.792 (number of files) ~50 GB

Tooks around 2 minutes (+ time 4 bigger files) for an incremental backup from sata-3 samsung 830 ssd to USB3 2,5“ found-in-the-cabin HDD.

CCC: ZFS raidz1 (4x sata-2 different sized disks from different manufacturers) to ZFS via USB 3 dock to an normal 3TB drive.

Anzahl der Dateien: 6.264 (number of files) ~2.4 TB
Anzahl der Ordner: 0 (number of folders … disk util seems to be broken here on zfs volumes!)

Took around 10 seconds to check changed files + time to copy changed stuff. The target HDD just has 100~140 mb/s write speed, so bigger files need a bit time, but always not less than 100 mb/s. CPU i7-3770 really isn’t impressed with that tasks. Kernel RAM usage is around 1.6 GB … but most of it should be my graphics cards. Never looked at zdb ... ram is to cheap to care about ram usage :-p

What is the time consuming part? Finding changed files or copy the changed files? For the last one … every tried rsync without the rsync algorithm? (--whole-file). For the first one ... maybe an time machine like approach using a deamon at runtime that holds changed folders in an sqlite db till the next backup?
/dev/null Offline


 
Posts: 16
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2012 7:13 am

time consumption with Carbon Copy Cloner

Post by grahamperrin » Sun Nov 11, 2012 6:40 am

/dev/null wrote:… What is the time consuming part? …


Are there ZFS snapshots on the source file system, the destination file system, or both?
grahamperrin Offline

User avatar
 
Posts: 1596
Joined: Fri Sep 14, 2012 10:21 pm
Location: Brighton and Hove, United Kingdom

Re: Need Help with a Backup Solution

Post by /dev/null » Sun Nov 11, 2012 7:31 am

On Both sides ... on the source 1 snapshot a day, on the target one snapshot a week (or at least after every backup i make)
/dev/null Offline


 
Posts: 16
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2012 7:13 am

consideration: snapshots

Post by grahamperrin » Sun Nov 11, 2012 8:05 am

Discover whether a single backup routine traverses:

  • not only the current filesystem at source and destination
  • also every snapshot at source and destination (mounts of which may be discreet).

If you allow Carbon Copy Cloner to complete, what's then logged with regard to snapshots?

(I took notes a few months ago, but not recently.)
grahamperrin Offline

User avatar
 
Posts: 1596
Joined: Fri Sep 14, 2012 10:21 pm
Location: Brighton and Hove, United Kingdom

Next

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 0 guests

cron