USB Drive For Backups

[matthew]

I am installing Proxmox on a HP DL380 which has a raid controller and 8 drives. I plan on putting all 8 drives on RAID 6 for speed and protection. I also want to run weekly snapshot backups to a USB connected external hard drive. Will that work or will there be problems running backups to a USB drive? Am I better off only using RAID 6 on 7 drives and using the 8th drive for backups?

 

[e100]

We had two servers backing up to USB disks for a couple years.
Sometimes( once in about 8 weeks) USB would be flaky and things not work as expected requiring a trip to the data center to unplug and replug the USB cable.
We switched from USB to eSATA, that has worked flawless, our drive dock supported both.

A USB drive should work just fine, but not all USB hardware is created equal.
I think our drive dock we have just had flaky USB support.

I do not endorse this product as I've never used it but we have something similar to this that supports USB or eSATA:
http://kingwin.com/products/cate/docking_stations/dm_2535u.asp

We also used cryptsetup to encrypt the disks and we rotate them offsite weekly.

 

[RobFantini]

We backup to disk then rsync the backups to usb 3.0 drives. I would not want to count on a usb drive being plugged in for backups to occur.

A useful package is usbmount . When a drive is plugged on it is mounted to /media/usb0 .

We use a cronscript that checks for a correct usb drive by checking if a file exists on the drive like /media/usb0/rs-usb-script-uses-this-drive .

If the file exists then we rsync -a --partial --del :/bkup/dump /media/usb0/dump/

The script works on any node that has a drive plugged in to.