I am setting up a backup server with roughly ten 2TB hard drives raided. The purpose of this machine is simply to back up about 3-10TB of data from another server.
What is the best way to achieve this backup. It would be nice to have version history. I thought about just setting up gitosis and having a git repo. The other machine will just git commit and git push onto this server at certain intervals. But I'm not sure git can handle TBs of data like this. The files consist of 90% images (jpeg, tiff, etc that wont change, so these are small files), and 10% are big database dumps and will change daily.
Would the best solution be to rsync it to the backup machine and use LVM to take snapshots? How about using TimeVault? I would like to have not just one copy of the backup, but multiple versions at different time intervals. Any information regarding this issue would be great.
Best Answer
I'd setup the box as a NAS with NextentaStor Community Edition (ZFS!) or OpenFiler.
Why bother with a full distro unless you have plans to use it as something else? Less things to go wrong because it's purpose-built with a smaller footprint; both OpenFiler and NextentaStor have their pros and cons, but either would be a better option for a pure storage appliance than straight-up Ubuntu.