This may be a naive question, but I was wondering what is the state of
BackupPC development? (I couldn't find answers on the sourceforge
site)

- Are major new features/extensions/improvements being implemented or
  only bugfixes and limited changes?
- Is their a roadmap and/or wishlist?
- Is their a formal team of developers or is it mostly Craig with some
  ad-hoc input from others?

The reason I ask is that to me BackupPC is a cup half empty/half
full.

On the one hand it is a great program with a clever pooling scheme
that works very well for Linux (And nothing I say below should be
taken as criticism of backuppc or its developers).

On the other hand there are a lot of areas of improvement if
you want to go beyond basic Linux file backup such as: (here is just a
small list of things I am interested in).
- Support for SeLinux and other extended attributes
- Support for Windows acl's
- Ability to backup other ntfs attributes to allow for full Windows
  restore (including integration with volume shadow copy)
- Better ability to manipulate past backups (delete backups, delete
  files, mount backups (rather than just browsing via filesystem),
  etc.)
- Updated rsync support (to protocol 30) -- this is critical for
  Windows to prevent rsync stalls and deal with long file names, etc.
- Better detection, notification, explanation, and response to errors
  (e.g., failed dumps, hung dumps, etc.)
- More granular permissions -- e.g., 
          - Allow non-admin users to view and restore only files they have
            permissions for.
          - Separate permissions for viewing/restoring files from
                administering the backup setup for the machine
- Better use of full md5sums to monitor integrity of the pool
  (plus routines for fixing/monitoring errors in the pool and the
  backup trees)
- Differential backup of large files so that small changes don't
  require full new backup

Ultimately, my dream backup system would combine the following (and
thus probably be too removed from BackupPC to be relevant)
- Pooling of common files (like BackupPC does now)

- Extension of pooling to the partial file-level for big files to
  allow for differential file backups

- Relational database (of your choice) to store all the file metadata (including
  as many attributes as you want). This would replace the
  hard link approach which limits BackupPC to running on certain
  filesystems and OS's and is ultimately a kludge (though a clever
  one). Also it replaces the "kludge" of repeat sparse directory trees
  and thousands of individual attrib files

- Use of same database to store other backup-related info like
  configuration parameters, schedules, and the per host/per backup
  information currently stored in the 'backups' and 'backupInfo'
  files). This would presumably clean up and speed up operations that
  now require opening/reading/parsing/closing files. (this would be
  similar to how mythtv uses a database to store all its schedule &
  listing data while storing the data itself in regular files)

- sshfs to allow you to mount and browse any backup as if it were
  still a live filesystem. (This would make all the pooling,
  compression, and database backend transparent to the user). This
  would be very powerful.

- Full ability to backup all the stuff necessary to clone/restore ntfs
  (and other filesystems as appropriate), including support of shadow
  copy

- Wide-range of user-selected compression and encryption choices

- Ability to add modules for new functionality

Now I'm not volunteering to do the above (lacking both skill and
ability) nor am I asking others to do so -- just sharing some
thoughts... (and maybe this has all been done already or maybe it is
all just idle dreaming)...


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