Re: Project Ideas.

Russell Senior wrote:
>>>>>>"John" == John Hampton <[email protected]> writes:
<snip>
> I did a PLUG AT talk on disk-to-disk backup solutions a few years
> ago.  Personally, I just use a naked rsync using the --link-dest, but
> in preparing the talk I also looked at two others: rdiff-backup and
> BackupPC.  Each uses a different storage mechanism.  

Like I said, I want a *GOOD* linux backup suite.

> rdiff-backup made me nervous because it stores deltas and any delta
> failure blows away the rest of the history.

Yes, that kind of sucks, but in some cases can be necessary, especially 
when dealing with very large data sets.

> BackupPC was especially well suited for networks of nearly identical
> installs, as the identical content was stored in common and metadata
> was stored separately.  It had a web intererface that allowed users to
> recover files themselves.  It backs up windows or linux.

Have you looked at their interface? It's just as bad as Veritas.  Also, 
it has all of the classic failures on the windows side: no open file 
backup, and can't backup NT ACLs[1].

> The rsync --link-dest method is cool, particularly on a Samba server
> because you can export the backup trees read-only and let users do
> self-recovery of older snapshots.  Through the magic of hardlinks, I
> had about 100 snapshots of a 10 gig workset on a 30 gig HD.

The ability to present a FS view of the backed up files is cool. 
However, I've found the rsync method to fail horribly when dealing with 
large numbers of files.  Try using rsync on a server with 1,000,000+ 
files.  It's no fun.  Rsync is also not reliably accountable.  When 
backing up files over a SMB mount, some files would show as having been 
backed up, but ended up being empty.

> All three of these can use rsync as a network transport.  

Yes, but that wasn't a requirement.

Thanks for the links.  They look interesting.  However, they still have 
a long way to go to live up to my needs.

-John

[1] http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/faq/limitations.html
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