Using dropbox as a storage destination for PBS

[krikey]

I'd be interested in opinions of using Dropbox or any other cloud based storage solution as a location for PBS chunks/backups.

I was considering using dbxfs and mounting the dropbox account as a folder within PBS. As the chunks are ~4mb, max file size wouldn't be an issue.

Has anyone achieved this with Dropbox or any other cloud solution?

 

[UdoB]

While I could imagine to use a remote storage solution like Dropbox for storing classic vzdump files... I would not expect it to work for a PBS datastore.

PBS needs IOPS. It recommends to use local SSDs because of this reason. (https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/installation.html#system-requirements)

Try benchmarking the IOPS for a mounted Dropbox folder. On the long run, not peak for a few seconds - there are probably caches involved. The results would be interesting; please post in [CODE]...[/CODE]-tags

fio --name=randrw  --ioengine=libaio  --direct=1 --bs=4k --iodepth=16 --size=8G --rw=randrw --rwmixread=5 --gtod_reduce=1 --runtime=1200

"fio" has a lot of options, this is just a random example, possibly unsuitable for a test with Dropbox. For more see: https://fio.readthedocs.io/en/latest/fio_doc.html

Disclaimer: I am not a Dropbox user

 

[krikey]

That makes sense as PBS uses some kind of chunk comparison system to reduce bandwidth I believe but reducing bandwidth means increased CPU and IO to determine if a chunk is still the same.

I'll update this ticket with my findings when I've had the chance to run some tests.