Re: Project Ideas.

Nathan Olberding wrote:
>>4. A good backup software suite for Linux.
> 
> 
> Care to expand on that? I'm interested and skilless. I mean, skillful.
> I mean... care to expand on that?

A bit of background:
1. Tape drives suck
2. Tapes suck
3. HDDs are cheap


Now, I have to deal with backup solutions for medium to small 
businesses.  Most of them have either Veritas (or as my coworker aptly 
calls it: swearitas) or ArcServ.  I don't know if you've dealt with 
them, but they suck.  Sure, they'll do a backup, but the interfaces are 
crap, and they aren't open source.  Now, on the open source side of 
things, all the solutions that I have found are: amanda (um no.) and 
hand crafted scripts that use ftp or rsync to backup or something.  The 
biggest problem with these, is that the interface sucks too.  On top of 
that, they generally aren't very accountable.  A lot of times it can be 
hard to tell if a backup was good or not.  It's even worse if you're 
trying to backup a windows client to a linux server.

So, unless I can find otherwise (and yes, it MUST be Open Source, ie, 
Arkia isn't an option) I've got to create my own.

Now you may ask, what will make yours better then the others? Well, I 
can't tell you that.  It's proprietary.  If I told you, I'd have to kill 
you! :)

The way I see solving these problems are thus:
1. An easy to use gui that isn't cluttered
2. Transfer only file deltas over the wire al la rsync
3. Present a "full backup" view of every backup (even though only 
changes are backed up).
4. Have every backup client be a server also
5. Backup according to schedule and according to need and according to 
availablility.  Ie, if I have a machine that's not that important, but 
would like to have it backed up if there is enough space, than do so.
6. Logs like crazy
7. Has the ability to spread a backup job accross multiple servers
A bit of background:and/or mirror the backup to 2 or more servers.
8. Make it cross platform so it actually works in Windows too.
9. Implemented in python (and perhaps a few c libraries)

That's the quick "it's late and I want to go to bed" elaboration.

If you're interested, I'd love to talk more about it.  Also, if you've 
had different experiences with backups, I'd love to hear them.  I would 
also like to hear what you think a good backup suite should have.

-John
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