[Samba] Is Samba Shadowcopying can be used in Production Environement with more than 20 TB of data

[Michael Heydon]

Ankush Grover wrote:
> Hi Friends,
>
>
> I am currently using Samba on Centos 4.4 as a domain member of AD 2003 with
> each user having a quota of 2GB(no of users is around 2,000). Now
> the management wants to increase the quota to 10GB with this there will be
> more than 20TB of data to be backup weekly which will take lots of hours.
> Currently Veritas backup software is used to backup data on tapes. There is
> a concept of snapshots of Samba with LVM where snapshots of samba are taken
> at the given interval but so far haven't found any good article or how-to on
> that and also what is the experience of users using this technology and also
> what other technologies are being to handle TBs of data.
>
>
> The plan is like this
>
> Samba Server with ShadowCopy Enabled + DAS (Direct Attached Storage)
>
>
> http://www.wlug.org.nz/SambaShadowCopyHowto
>
> Kindly let me know if you need any further inputs
>
>
> Thanks & Regards
>   
My understanding of the samba ShadowCopy stuff is that it doesn't 
actually take snapshots itself, you need something else to take the 
snapshots and once they exist the Samba/ShadowCopy stuff will let the 
users connect to the server with the standard windows ShadowCopy client 
to browse the snapshots. While this might be neat, I don't see how it 
would help you get your data onto tape any quicker or easier.

We have something setup here (on a smaller scale) that might be useful. 
Our main file server rsync's with our backup server every hour (using 
hardlinks to keep snapshots). Since relatively little data changes 
between each sync, it is fairly fast (approx 5 minutes with no noticable 
slowdown for the clients) the backup server can then take as long as it 
likes to write to tape/etc without affecting the main server.

*Michael Heydon - IT Administrator *
michaelh at jaswin.com.au <mailto:michaelh at jaswin.com.au>