[Bacula-users] filesystem for disk backups

Arno Lehmann

2008-10-13 10:50:56 UTC

Hi,

Post by Lucio Crusca
Hello *,
I'm about to configure Bacula 2.4.2 on a Debian Lenny server. It will backup
on external usb disks (500GB each, the full backup is 60GB more or less).
What's the best choice for the filesystem?

A question you can discuss forever :-) or just ignore...

Personally, I typically use ext2 or FAT32, depending on needs.

Journaling is - often - not very useful here, as it slows down
throughput even more, and as long as you don't journal the actual data
doesn't help you much in case of failure - I don't only need
filesystem integrity for backups, I need to be sure of the actual file
data. Thus, IMO, un-journaled file systems are ok for backup purposes.

Post by Lucio Crusca
Is there one that maximizes
available space? Can I just give bacula the whole partition /dev/sdg1
unformatted?

Bacula needs a file system to work on. You could save partitioning,
though (use /dev/sdg as a whole) but Iw ouldn't recommend that as it
confuses others who need to access that disk.

You can tweak the ext2/3 filesystems to create a minimal number of
inodes, which is ok if you expect to store only large files. That
saves a bit of the capacity. You can also set the reserved blocks to 0.

If you need to be able to use the backups on windows machines, FAT32
is the most reasonable FS, unless you trust the linux NTFS drivers.
None of these FSes can be tweaked for maximum net capacity as far as I
know.

Short answer: Use whatever you're comfortable with, and keep in mind
that journaling can negatively affect performance and might not gain
you any data security.

Arno

Post by Lucio Crusca
Thanks in advance,
Lucio.

--
Arno Lehmann
IT-Service Lehmann
Sandstr. 6, 49080 Osnabrück
www.its-lehmann.de