Looking to load it with 16 x 500GB WD Green drives with two spares on hand. Not sure which RAID level, RAID 5,10,50,60
No matter what I use with that many drives I get huge capacity. This is the controller card I was looking at using as well for the direct attachment:
Adaptec 2228800-R PCI Express SATA / SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) 5445 Kit Controller Card
I was going to use a Dell PE 860 to bring it all together. What are your thoughts, opinions, suggestions for a proper or recommended R1Soft setup?
R1Soft is a backup “solution” aimed at companies that want to backup only the changes that have been made since the last time a backup was created. Its a good idea, but it went horribly wrong. I am writing about it today because it was such a poor experience working with them and we had so many server problems and REPEATED DATA LOSS that I felt compelled to warn other hosting companies and customers about this extremely poor product.
R1soft caused enormous I/O load that literally killed our servers off and on multiple occasions simply would not restore our data and caused 100% data loss on the servers we had “backed up”.
MAJOR TECHNICAL DEFICIENCIES AND OPERATIONAL ISSUES WITH R1SOFT -
1) Buagent (Their software that records what has changed) is a HUGE i/o pig. It constantly blocks on I/O when there are changes causing every other drive or array in our system to lag while it catches up. R1soft told me it “works great” and to send them over details and they would “Look into it”.
2) Buserver (Their software that writes what has changed) is INCREDIBLY slow in every way that it is virtually unusable when you have a lot of data to back up with tens of thousands block changes every day per server. Clearly it hasn’t been tested well under sustained and real heavy load - at least in my opinion. There are multiple kernel and userspace methods to speed this up, but again it falls flat on its face when trying to keep up with our load.
3) Restores are buggy and VERY unreliable. We have attempted more than 20 restores (whole partitions) and had more than 30% be a complete failure, meaning TOTAL data loss. Doing user level restores were the same story - incomplete backups, unreliable and SLOW restores.
4) R1soft support is lackluster to say the least. When I complained they said, “You only opened 17 tickets in the last 60 days.” 17 tickets? Often when we had issues doing a restore or other problems we would call and get no one to answer the phone. Its comforting to know that when you can’t do a restore for 500 clients that we can possibly talk to someone on Monday who will blow us off and tell us that the newest version of the software MIGHT fix our issue. In the meantime they apologized for losing all our data over and over again. Wonderful.
5) The software is based on filesystem block changes. The problem is that the kernel and ext3 and reiser are changing all the time. As we made updates it constantly broke R1soft. When they would finally fix the problem it usually required us to reseed the entire backup again losing everything that we had previously backed up and putting enormous load on the server again while it started over from scratch
In all my years of hosting I have never had such a bad experience with a “partner” company as R1soft.
Just thought I would let other potential customers and hosting companies know my experience.
I am currently moving my accounts to providers that use R1Soft as a backup solution. This is a security measure, but I am planning to use it as a marketing point too.
An after purchasing a backup account from Steadfast that includes support for R1Soft (and learning to use it), I am planning to resell their product.
Those ideas sound good, but is R1Soft software really as good as it looks like? Some years ago i had a problem with a very known (and trustable) VPS provider. After having a hard disk crash, they told that their Virtuozzo based backups weren't reliable, so I lost some data.
Anyone have any experience using R1Soft in a virtualized environment as the VPS provider rather than the VPS user?
I'm wanting to offer some solid bare metal backup. It is generally difficult to do sound backup procedures in dom0, since can sometimes suffer file corruption when backing up running domUs from outside of them, and I use LVM drives rather than disk images.
I've always heard backing up from inside domU is best.
R1Soft is an obvious option but the pricing seems quite high and I'm wondering what kind of CPU/disk usage impact it could have. Say you just have 16 virtual servers per box (2 per core)... that is 16 instances running, and ~$2400 just in licenses alone.
Anyone have any experience doing backups/CDP in a virtualized environment? You using R1Soft or something else? Inside domU or out?
I wish R1Soft offered monthly pricing, since then the upfront investment per customer isn't nearly as much.
if anyone here is using Steadfast R1Soft CDP Backup for his servers and if it's truly working for him when a restore is needed and whether is causes a noticeable load or not?
I got an idea that using r1soft CDP to move server, since it provides restoring data to a different server. But I never used it, not sure if it is doable.
Any one did this before? any requirements (software/hardware) for new server that will be moved in?
what backup solution you all use. We plan on starting to use a backup solution but was wondering what the best one is. R1Soft seems to be pretty popular and I was wondering where all of you guys get your licenses from them. Also if anyone knows how much does a license for 1 backup server and 2 agent servers cost. I see it is like $500.00 at R1Soft directly but is that the only way to get it. Also is R1Soft very good? Please rate it 1 -10 in your reply.
I have several servers and i want to provide at my servers a continuos backup data protection and disaster recovery backups to a off-site location using R1Soft software.
So does anyone knows any good and reliable company who provides the service off making backups from external servers using R1Soft?
I have been looking around and until know i found:
The Planet - Here i can buy any kind of server and havint installed with R1Soft for a extra cost of 50$
SteadFast - Here i can rent a full managed backup service using Steadfast Off-Site R1Soft CDP Backups described at: [url]
on this backup solution. How do they do the backups. If you`re a datacenter, are backups routed through the internal network through a central backup server or do you backup externally to their servers?
I have recently had to set up all my backups again (add me to the ranks of disappointed bqinternet customers). I choose to go with Handy Networks - and I am SO very happy I did. The got all my servers set up quickly and correctly, but the most impressive thing was the communication - it is one of the best support experiences I have had in this industry. Not only on the initial set up, but even the questions i had afterward - they went above and beyond in their answers.
I know companies get ripped all the time on here for bad support - just wanted to give a little praise!
Does someone know any other company besides fxhbackup and bqinternet that sells backup services based on R1Soft CDP?
My current solution is constantly giving broken pipe lines error. I was told this is because of overloaded backup servers. I did had my own CDP server running on the same DC and it worked like a charm, but currently my provider says it will not support it anymore and its terrible slow on his CDP server, besides it breaks backup.
Can someone point me one a CDP solution that works?
Has someone had experience with Acronis True Echo Server Enterprise?
