gpg: Signature made Thu Jan 26 09:51:26 2017 UTC
gpg: using DSA key 2099B64CBF15490B
gpg: Good signature from "Andy Smith <andy@strugglers.net>" [unknown]
gpg: aka "Andrew James Smith <andy@strugglers.net>" [unknown]
gpg: aka "Andy Smith (UKUUG) <andy.smith@ukuug.org>" [unknown]
gpg: aka "Andy Smith (BitFolk Ltd.) <andy@bitfolk.com>" [unknown]
gpg: aka "Andy Smith (Linux User Groups UK) <andy@lug.org.uk>" [unknown]
gpg: aka "Andy Smith (Cernio Technology Cooperative) <andy.smith@cernio.com>" [unknown]
Hi Dominic,
On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 08:38:28AM +0000, Dominic Cleal wrote:
> Can archive storage be used for backups run by BitFolk, or only regular
> SSD storage?
Good question; I should have added that one to the FAQ.
At the moment not. BitFolk's backups currently use rsnapshot, which
works like this:
- rm -r hourly.5
- mv hourly.4 hourly.5
- mv hourly.3 hourly.4
- mv hourly.2 hourly.3
- mv hourly.1 hourly.2
- cp -al hourly.0 hourly.1
- rsync […args…] root@your-vps:/path hourly.0/your-vps/
That happens at every backup run, so potentially 6 times a day. Also
once a day a "du" is needed against each customer's backups in order
to work out exactly how much has been used and the differential
usage between iterations.
All of this is obviously a large amount of IO and in fact when the
backup VMs were on hosts with HDDs it was getting difficult to have
a backup run complete within 4 hours (the maximum available run time
at 6 times per day).
So I don't think I can risk putting backups on HDDs again as they
will end up running too slowly.
Previously I offered backup space at a 25% discount on the
experimental deduplicating platform and if that proves stable and
reliable then I will adjust the backup prices to that, but
unfortunately I can't see a way to make it any cheaper than that.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
