Backups Hardwares for FreeBSD

[Tom Judge]

Gary Palmer wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 01:38:21PM -0700, Freddie Cash wrote:
>> On October 23, 2007 09:34 am Paulo Fragoso wrote:
>>> We have a FreeBSD mail server with 1TB RAID 6 using Areca ARC-1220
>>> controler, all works fine.
>>>
>>> Today our backups are made on DDS-4 tapes, they are very slow and too
>>> small, this is our problem. What is a good (modern) alternative to
>>> DDS-4 working on FreeBSD?
>> For our multi-TB systems, we do disk-based backups using dar ... to 
>> another multi-TB system.  :)
>>
>> We use a custom shell script to handle creating full and incremental 
>> backups and to rotate through multiple directories to keep a couple 
>> backups around.  All via gigabit ethernet and NFS.  And once a week we 
>> copy a full backup offsite via SSH tunnels to another multi-TB system via 
>> a gigabit fibre link.
>>
>> We're using RAID5 with hot-spares on 3Ware 9550SX controllers.
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Any issues withe RAID5 sets on the 3Ware controllers?  I've heard bad things
> about RAID5 on older 3Ware controllers when a disk fails.  Just wondering
> if the situation is improved.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Gary

There was a discussion about this recently on stable@ I think, but we 
run a large number of 3ware controllers (75xx, 9xxx, ranging from 4-12 
channels).  We have never had a problem recovering a 95xx array, however 
recovering a 75xx array has been difficult/impossible this is probably 
our fault for not setting up regular verifies to detect drives failing 
in areas not regularly used.

Tom