Re: [SLE] Homebrew NAS device

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• In reply to: Joe Polk: "[SLE] Homebrew NAS device"
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Date: Thu, 2 Sep 2004 16:21:08 -0500
To: SuSE List <suse-linux-e@suse.com>

Joe wrote regarding '[SLE] Homebrew NAS device' on Thu, Sep 02 at 08:37:
> Question:
> If I were to build a NAS box using Linux, what would be the prefered protocol
> for file transfer? Would rsync be fast enough? Or should I consider scripting
> ftp or something else? I know smb is too slow for large amounts of data. I'm
> wanting to do disk-to-disk backups for about 300GB. Thoughts?

I use rsync for nightly snapshots of 6 machines comprising about 260GB of
data - most of which is html pages and individual email messages (using
Maildir). The whole process consists of making a hardlinked copy of the
targed directory, then updating the target dir from the server root using
rsync over ssh. Between the perl script that does the linking and the
rsync step, the process takes about 3-4 hours most nights. Most of that
delay is from rsync building an in-memory list of several million files,
so it seems. I know that I can transfer that amount of data in a tarball
quite a bit quicker.

So, the answer somewhat depends on the data. If the data consists of several
large files, then rsync will be great - though you probably want to initiate
from the client side and run an rsync server on the NAS. If you need to
move a whole lot of small files, then you may encounter less-than-stellar
performance from rsync. If I didn't need rsync for other reasons, I'd
probably just open up a netcat session on each side of the link and dump
tar into / out of the pipe (that's amusing read out of context).

As the other person said, NFS mounting the NAS and copying the files might
work well, too, but there again it depends on your situation. If you're
just doing a one-shot thing, a full blown network filesystem probably isn't
the right choice. If you wanna update several times through the day, then
NFS may be what you need. I dislike NFS for performance needs, though, so
take that as you may. :)

--Danny

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• Previous message: Randall R Schulz: "Re: [SLE] BASH History"
• In reply to: Joe Polk: "[SLE] Homebrew NAS device"
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