Minecraft Backups
Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2012 2:20 am
I thought some of you might like to see how our backups look. Every 24 hours our backup system initiates a backup of all our Minecraft servers. It usually takes about 2 hours due to all the tiny files which destroy disk performance.
You can see that every day the backups increase in size. Sometimes 20MB sometimes 100MB. But already our backups are pushing 13.5GB. Absolutely everything gets backed up in these 7zip archives. The world files, player files, all our plugins & their settings. Every file. The only thing not backed up in this manner is our MySQL databases which are used only by LogBlock. Those are already 70GB in size but don't need to be backed up as they are not important.
Our backup array is made up of three x 320GB Hard Drives in RAID0 meaning there is 960GB of total storage dedicated just to our Minecraft backups. The reason I've used RAID0 instead of RAID5 or RAID6 is that we needed extreme performance and backups don't really need redundancy.
As you know we run our Minecraft servers from a Solid State Disk so it has the best performance. Even with three hard disks combined in RAID0 it doesn't even come close to 30% of the performance of our SSD. But it does have 15x the storage capacity.
Hope this was somewhat interesting and goes to show the lengths we take to make sure your builds are safe. In the event that our SSD broke suddenly we could be back up and running in about 2 hours, which is the time it would take to decompress one of the backup archives.
You can see that every day the backups increase in size. Sometimes 20MB sometimes 100MB. But already our backups are pushing 13.5GB. Absolutely everything gets backed up in these 7zip archives. The world files, player files, all our plugins & their settings. Every file. The only thing not backed up in this manner is our MySQL databases which are used only by LogBlock. Those are already 70GB in size but don't need to be backed up as they are not important.
Our backup array is made up of three x 320GB Hard Drives in RAID0 meaning there is 960GB of total storage dedicated just to our Minecraft backups. The reason I've used RAID0 instead of RAID5 or RAID6 is that we needed extreme performance and backups don't really need redundancy.
As you know we run our Minecraft servers from a Solid State Disk so it has the best performance. Even with three hard disks combined in RAID0 it doesn't even come close to 30% of the performance of our SSD. But it does have 15x the storage capacity.
Hope this was somewhat interesting and goes to show the lengths we take to make sure your builds are safe. In the event that our SSD broke suddenly we could be back up and running in about 2 hours, which is the time it would take to decompress one of the backup archives.