"backup storage is something you never regret paying for"
Indeed, but the time and CPU it takes to do backups can be a very nasty trade off.
For that matter, as I write this, due to a mistake I made after a 85 minutes power outage yesterday, I'm just now doing my daily incremental backup of my home machines to an LTO-4 tape drive. Keeping that drive fed fast enough to prevent "shoe-shining" took some effort, Bacula spools up to 100G at a time to a partition on a single 15K disk on a separate controller. But if I had a LTO-5 drive, from what I've heard there's no single disk in existence that can keep up with a drive (not counting SSDs, which are a very poor match for this use case).
My feed array to the LTO-5 drive is 4 2TB (Hitachi) in RAID-10. Backup strategies, much like build systems are some constant factor harder than they appear.
I'd like to migrate to ZFS but have yet to. Still just running EXT4.
HN should be on a replicated data store like Riak. Losing a node or two shouldn't take the system down, or should at least run in a degraded state (read only) until hardware is restored.
Indeed, but the time and CPU it takes to do backups can be a very nasty trade off.
For that matter, as I write this, due to a mistake I made after a 85 minutes power outage yesterday, I'm just now doing my daily incremental backup of my home machines to an LTO-4 tape drive. Keeping that drive fed fast enough to prevent "shoe-shining" took some effort, Bacula spools up to 100G at a time to a partition on a single 15K disk on a separate controller. But if I had a LTO-5 drive, from what I've heard there's no single disk in existence that can keep up with a drive (not counting SSDs, which are a very poor match for this use case).