Re: [bitfolk] Filesystems/volume management for home servers

Hello,

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 06:07:45PM +0000, Hugo Mills wrote:

>    I'm now up to 11TB of data on a 13TB RAID-1, and it's been fine for
> years, even over power failures and several disk failures.

My experiences with btrfs and online disk replacement have not been
great. No lost data (partly thanks to you talking me through one
recovery a long time ago - thanks!), but have not yet managed a
single instance without having to reboot at least once.

The best thing I have to say about btrfs is that it's enabled me to
recycle the large number of variously-sized HDDs that BitFolk has
gone through as I can just slot them in without worrying about array
topologies and such.

>    For backups of a mostly-append data store such as yours, the
> cheapest option in the ~4 TB -- ~150 TB range is BD-R. Over 150 TB or
> so, it's cheaper to use LTO tapes. I'll need to update my spreadsheet
> if you want more precise figures on that.

I didn't know anything about BD-R until just now but it looks like
they max out at 100GB. So do you need to sit there changing discs
for the initial backup? I guess an incremental will fit on one disc
and then it's just a matter of how long you go before doing a full
checkpoint.

I am currently backing up about 530GiB to a rented Hetzner server
that costs me about €40/month so not cheap, but fairly convenient.
Would be much cheaper to build my own backup host out of cast off
hardware and only ongoing cost being the electricity, but I need it
outside my home for disaster recovery purposes.

I also periodically send a full copy to Amazon Glacier for emergency
purposes. This costs about $3/month to keep there, but if I were to
ever need to restore it, it would cost about $50 one off to download
it all. So I hope to never have to do that.

Since the end of the HP Microserver cashback offer I wonder what the
next iteration of my home fileserver would look like. Right now it
is one of the Microservers plus an 8 bay eSATA disk shelf.

I think those disk shelves are too expensive for what should be
quite a dumb device. Maybe it would be better to just buy one tower
case to fit the drives into. The nice thing about the Microservers
though is that you have a known good level of engineering and
design, whereas some cheap thing you buy and put together yourself I
feel you'd risk encountering all manner of niggling problems.

My requirements for such a machine would be:

- amd64 architecture

- Not immensely power hungry. Doesn't have to be crippled either,
but a CPU that doesn't need active cooling would probably be good.

- At least 10 hot swap 3.5" drive bays connected by SATA, or 8 of
them if I could install a pair of internal flash devices to hold
the OS.

So if anyone has built something like that recently on the cheap I'd
be interested to hear what you went for.

If the cashback offer was still there I'd be tempted to buy 2 or 3
Microservers and play with Ceph…

Cheers,
Andy

--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting