Backup volume issues
Feb. 23rd, 2019 10:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtbcI have backups working well enough but I can't shake the feeling that things could be better. They certainly should be. After having seen some I/O errors last Fall I have now gone through two operating systems (fearing a USB driver issue in the first), three sets of USB cables and two drive manufacturers and I still see the occasional error which for backup volumes is intolerable. These are USB3.0 2.5" mechanical portable 2TB drives.
Furthermore, our powerline ethernet adaptor pair appears to be buggy: they can work well but when they fall offline they then require manual intervention. Reading reviews of other manufacturers' suggests that many adaptors available in Britain are poor in that way for at least some owners. This makes it hard to run the house's backups when some machines are on one side of the pair and some on the other.
Also, even having switched operating system, backup drive performance remains slow. NetBSD still has raw devices though the cryptographic driver examples never use the raw; I am not clear on the difference. I can write large chunks of data to the raw device at 80MB/s which is quite acceptable. However, I am rsync'ing filesystems, not writing archives: I want easy browsing and random access. With smaller writes or using the regular device I am down to more like 2MB/s which is tolerable but dreadful. The cryptographic aspect seems to add negligible overhead; backups do not seem CPU-bound.
I wish I saw some easy alternative. Despite our slow ADSL the drives could be less portable if I could reach off-site backups over the network but I don't want to pay a non-trivial monthly fee for sizable remote storage; my remote servers are cheap low-capacity ones. I don't have an easy alternative way to connect upstairs networking to downstairs: being in a rented house I am not about to drill holes for and route cabling. The computers are just compact systems with SSDs; USB drives are the only way I see to grant them large storage. I would like to avoid having to buy a third batch of external drives or at least have a stronger sense that I could rely on such.
Furthermore, our powerline ethernet adaptor pair appears to be buggy: they can work well but when they fall offline they then require manual intervention. Reading reviews of other manufacturers' suggests that many adaptors available in Britain are poor in that way for at least some owners. This makes it hard to run the house's backups when some machines are on one side of the pair and some on the other.
Also, even having switched operating system, backup drive performance remains slow. NetBSD still has raw devices though the cryptographic driver examples never use the raw; I am not clear on the difference. I can write large chunks of data to the raw device at 80MB/s which is quite acceptable. However, I am rsync'ing filesystems, not writing archives: I want easy browsing and random access. With smaller writes or using the regular device I am down to more like 2MB/s which is tolerable but dreadful. The cryptographic aspect seems to add negligible overhead; backups do not seem CPU-bound.
I wish I saw some easy alternative. Despite our slow ADSL the drives could be less portable if I could reach off-site backups over the network but I don't want to pay a non-trivial monthly fee for sizable remote storage; my remote servers are cheap low-capacity ones. I don't have an easy alternative way to connect upstairs networking to downstairs: being in a rented house I am not about to drill holes for and route cabling. The computers are just compact systems with SSDs; USB drives are the only way I see to grant them large storage. I would like to avoid having to buy a third batch of external drives or at least have a stronger sense that I could rely on such.
