Hi Chris,

On Tue, May 06, 2008 at 02:55:27PM -0400, Wood.Chris AT tatravelcenters DOT com 
wrote:

> Thanks, but what about weekly full backups? Would that swamp our remote 
> 512mbps connections? 

No. The difference between full and incremental backup (using rsync) is
just that with full backup, some (configurabel) percentage of the files
is checked even though it looks unaltered, so corruptions in BackupPCs
pool will be detected. Therefore, the full only needs slightly more
bandwidth, but a lot more I/O and CPU on client and server.

> Our big issue here is retention - we have to keep backed up files 
> indefinitely, can backuppc maintain a continually growing catalog of 
> indefintely retained files? 

Yes, it can. Just set the appropiate configuration properties to
insanely high values. The real question is: Will your file system 
cope with all the files? And: Are you prepared to backup the BackupPC
data to some offsite storage (Tape, swappable disks etc.)? Do you have
an estimate of the volume of data?

Hm. If you really want to keep indefinitely, you could use the following
strategy:
- set up BackupPC with some swappable storage (like eSATA disks,
  possibly in RAID1 for security)
- let BackupPC fill the storage
- if you reach 95%, remove the storage, replace by new disks and start
  from scratch (bonus: take one backup from each host as a starting
  point to get the pool filled initially so you spare the file transfer
  over WAN)
  
I suppose, you're talking about lots of Gigabytes here. Managing
Terabytes of storage is still a challenge since disks didn't get
a lot faster during the last years (as opposed to CPU and memory). It
needs careful planning (RAID, volume management, file system, upgrade
paths).

> Of course, we would probably need to install a 64-bit database server....

There's no database involved in BackupPC. It's storage is pure file
system.

Bye,

Tino.

-- 
„What we resist, persists.” (Zen saying)

www.craniosacralzentrum.de
www.forteego.de

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