[Samba] Large Backups to Windows

[Helmut Hullen]

Hallo, Justin,

Du (vap0rtranz) meintest am 22.07.08:

> Hi,

> This is a kind of scenario question for best practices -- within
> limits.  I've inherited a less than ideal backup situation: backups
> are transferred from Samba to Windows.  I can't get out of this
> situation without major re-engineering and the only problem is the
> time it takes to do full backups. Specifically:

> -200GiB is taking a few days to backup
> -Cpio is doing the backup across cifs

> Here are optimizations I've tried so far:

> +switch from smbfs to cifs -- yes this is an old-ish system but Samba
> 3.0.10
> +mount local noatime
> +installed 1G more memory -- almost 1.5G is cached
> +verified low processor & vm usage -- data i/o doesn't
> +appear to be spreading to other subsystems configure Windows for
> larger +FS cache

I use "rsnapshot" for backups,
        http://www.rsnapshot.org/
        http://arktur.de/Wiki/Zusatzprogramme:rsnapshot

It uses "hard links" and "rsync", the filesystem of the backup drive  
must understand "hard links".
Backing up 40 GB (using an existing older backup) needs on my 500 MHz  
machine with 192 MB RAM about 20 minutes. The target disk is slow: it  
reads about 40 MByte/s.

I also back up some Windows clients via smbfs/cifs in this way.

Viele Gruesse!
Helmut