On Wed, 2009-04-08 at 15:28 +0200, Thomas Karcher wrote:
  

Hi,

    

This is probably the wrong place to ask, but people on the right lists 
won't have experience with the kind of disk activity that backuppc 
creates.  I have my main backuppc server set up so I can periodically 
swap and raid-sync a new disk and keep a copy offsite.  I'd like to have 
a VMware/virtualbox or other virtual machine image that could run on any 
machine that would be able to access this disk via a USB adapter for 
quick emergency restores.  Does anyone have experience with any of the 
virtual machine's USB handling to know if this would be practical and 
which technology would be best at it?
      

I don't know if it's best - but I run backuppc inside a Xen VM
productively on a device that is forwarded via nbd (network block
device). It's quasi independent from the actual underlying storage type
and can be accessed over the network, since you don't necessarily have
to plug the USB disk into the VM's host machine.

Performance is of course not really great but surprisingly good. I
evaluated (very shortly) against mounting via NFS, and NFS just sucks
with backuppc.
    

Thomas,

I think it depends on the NFS server you are using.  I have over 1500
clients backing up via 7 backuppc servers attached via nfs to a high
performance Exastore NAS device.  Works great.

ski