Les Mikesell wrote at about 16:01:49 -0600 on Thursday, November 5, 2009:
 > Jeffrey J. Kosowsky wrote:
 > 
 > >  > > I was wondering if is it possibile to limit the backup space of an
 > >  > > user like 30Gb or something like that
 > >  > 
 > >  > This is not currently possible with BackupPC. It wouldn't fit the
 > >  > pooling scheme either - how would you count a file which is shared among
 > >  > 5 backups and maybe 3 users?
 > >  > 
 > > 
 > > Well, one possible metric consistent with pooling would be to just
 > > measure unique files per user which corresponds to the incremental
 > > requirements of that user and correspondingly the amount of space that
 > > would be freed were such user to disappear.
 > > 
 > > Of course it's not implemented now but it wouldn't be too hard if
 > > there were a database back-end ;)
 > > 
 > > Otherwise, the problem is difficult since while you can tell me when a
 > > user adds a file to a pool, you can't easily tell either when another
 > > user starts also using the file or conversely when a previously pooled
 > > file becomes unpooled -- what I mean is that you can't go backwards
 > > from presence in the pool to locations in the pc directory unless you
 > > created some type of database to do that mapping.
 > 
 > Even if you knew that, is it fair to consider the first instance 
 > differently than the others?  For example if you have 3 users each with 
 > copies of the same large set of files, would you treat the one that is 
 > backed up first differently than the other 2?  If you expire them all 
 > and back up in a different order, someone else would take the hit.

Yes, there is a small timing issue due to the sequence of backups but
that could be handled by "delaying" the accounting until all daily
backups are done.

I'm not saying the implementation is trivial nor may it always be 100%
fair but neither is any quota system since people always claim to have
different needs and situations. But, in principle, if you had a
backup database, a reasonably fair system could be devised to
eliminate outliers.

On a similar vein, the ability to restrict backups by
size/ownership/mode etc. mentioned in my earlier thread would be
helpful if you wanted to eliminate outlier backups such as huge /tmp
files or files owned by specific users or very old files or some
combination of the above.


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