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#1 2017-08-17 06:08:07

wowbagger
Member
Registered: 2017-05-11
Posts: 41

xsibackup / lessfs / ganesha

Hi,

I've followed the excellent tutorial (https://33hops.com/deduplication-what-to-choose.html) but had to change some steps because I'm CentOS7.3 but in short: I have lessfs up & running and mounted it on a remote ESX server that has xsibackup.

There are some things I don't understand.

I'm running xsibackup's and used the mounted lessfs as target and that works perfectly. When I do a du -sh /mnt I see it has 181G of backed up VM's but when I check the actual lessfs (/home/lessfs-data) it only holds 200Mb? A lot of the ESX servers are pretty much the same but 200Mb really seems not much, does it yield that much space saving? When the full backup is finished I'm going to retrieve some VM's to see if I can restore them.

Another thing I can't understand is that on the local lessfs server the folder /home/lessfs-files has no data in it whatsoever, I can copy files in there and retrieve them.  But if I NFS mount that folder I actually see all the directories & files xsibackup copied there through the NFS mount. But without NFS mount the files are nowhere but "inside lessfs" and only accessible via NFS mount? Are lessfs-files and lessfs-through-nfs different filesystems?

Thanks for any help!

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#2 2017-08-17 08:09:24

admin
Administrator
Registered: 2017-04-21
Posts: 2,057

Re: xsibackup / lessfs / ganesha

Yes, there could be that much space saving, but that depends on the type of OSs you are backing up, how much they repeat, the number of VMs per backup, the number of backups, etc... Your FS could be not working well too, so make your tests.

As any other de-duplicated inline file system LessFS stores data chunks in one place (lessfs-data) and hash tables in other, you can't mix them or you'll mess things up.

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#3 2017-08-17 08:29:40

wowbagger
Member
Registered: 2017-05-11
Posts: 41

Re: xsibackup / lessfs / ganesha

Thanks for you reply!
I was under the impression that everything I would send to it over NFS would also be under lessfs-files/ but there is nothing there. When I view it over NFS all the ESX VM directories & files are there. I extracted some files and the md5sum is identical to the original file. I still don't understand how I can see the filesystem over NFS but not local when I do ls -la lessfs-files/ but I suppose it is designed to work like that and I need to read up about inline file systems.
It seems lessfs is no longer maintained? There's not much detailed info I can find about it on the net. I might swap it with sdfs but it seems lessfs is better for large backup files.
Thanks again for the tutorial and the excellent xsibackup!

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#4 2017-08-18 05:59:59

admin
Administrator
Registered: 2017-04-21
Posts: 2,057

Re: xsibackup / lessfs / ganesha

There's nothing such as a FS in the de-duplicated NAS appliance. If you are interested in how things work, you can start here

https://33hops.com/lightweight-deduplic … iance.html

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