[geeks] NetApp for the common man

[Bill Bradford]

The neatest thing about NetApp filers is their "snapshot" capability.

I've got a NetApp 520, but its a 4U rackmount system, along with four
3U disk shelves with seven 9G disks each.  All together, I've got about
a half-cabinet of space and power use (and heat output), and around 200G
of total storage after filesystem and RAID overhead.  Not really worth the
power bill it would cost me to run 24/7.

For years, I've been doing backups (and "snapshots") manually using rsync.

Recently, I found this page, which shows how to do proper "delta-changes-only"
snapshots:

http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

Then, I found this, that does everything that Mike above is
doing manually:

http://www.rsnapshot.org/

I'm in heaven right now.  Less than an hour, and I've got OpenBSD installed
on a P3-700 system with 256 megs of RAM and a 40G IDE hard drive.  I've got
rotating hourly and daily snapshots, and I'm working on weekly and monthly.

I've basically built a "remote backup" appliance in less time it would have
taken me to install and configure RedHat or Solaris.

I may actually switch to NetBSD later (still undecided), and will be adding 
an Adaptec 2940WU SCSI controller hooked to a tape drive of some sort, so I
can do backups of all my colocated systems and never have to go to the 
datacenter unless I have hardware problems.

Now I just need to find pocket change or hardware to trade for an 80G or
larger IDE hard drive...

Bill

-- 
bill bradford
austin texas