On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 11:18:15AM -0500, Adam Williams wrote:
> I've been running BackupPC in a test environment here, and so far it has 
> been working very well.  I'd like to roll it out into production, but I 
> wanted to know, are there any businesses or government entities using 
> BackupPC in live environments?   Can you give a range of employees or 

Internet2 uses backuppc to back up linux & solaris servers with rsync
as the transport.  

We built a new backup server 2 or 3 months ago.  On it:

There are 68 hosts that have been backed up, for a total of:

    * 255 full backups of total size 3231.73GB (prior to pooling and 
compression),
    * 1967 incr backups of total size 2006.21GB (prior to pooling and 
compression). 

We have plenty of critical data stored in backuppc. 

Whenever we've needed to restore we've been successful.  We also do
periodic restore tests, of course.

It has been mostly reliable.  We had a particular backup client that had
a lot of failures; i ended up splitting its backups into two pieces and
that kludged the issue into submission.  It still has some failures but
not enough that backuppc gives up retrying.  BackupPC could have been more
robust about dealing with these failures (eg, retrying smaller pieces).
I haven't complained on the list since i wasn't in a position to fix it myself.

We chose not to use it for our Windows servers (don't want SMB shares,
rsyncd seems kludgy, etc).  We have access to a backup service that we
use for windows clients.

We chose not to use it for our Mac laptops because they are mobile and
we don't do any dynamic DNS or similar, so we have a host lookup issue.
I believe it would have been solvable with moderate development effort but
management chose to go another direction.  Note that with Mac clients,
you have a resource fork & metadata issue.  You have this issue with
lots of other backup software too.


The big operational issue with backuppc is offsite backups.  We do
this by offsiting disks, as described by various folks on the list.

I would prefer a good network replication option.

ALternately, I'd also prefer to have a better way of offsiting by
tape (tapes are more physically durable than disk).  You can put a 
raw filesystem image on tape but i worry what happens if you have a minor
error on one tape. 

danno
--
Dan Pritts, Sr. Systems Engineer
Internet2
office: +1-734-352-4953 | mobile: +1-734-834-7224

SC09: Visit the Internet2 Booth #1355
November 14-20, 2009
Portland, Oregon Convention Center
http://events.internet2.edu/2009/sc09/

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