Mike Bydalek <mbydalek AT compunetconsulting DOT com> wrote on 02/19/2010 
11:28:25 AM:

> Thanks for all the input.  I'm starting to fully understand how
> BackupPC scheduling is working now.  My apologies for not stating that
> I was/am using rsync as it is the only choice that makes sense =)

In which case, after your first (potentially very long) full backup, the 
rest of the system should work very well.  Caveats:  how big are the files 
that are changing (given an equal number of files changing per day, small 
files are easier than large files), and how much total data changes on a 
daily basis.

If you're making gigabytes of changes per day, nothing will help you: 
you'll be limited by the bandwidth.  If you're making small changes but to 
very large files, you will have to hash the entire file of each of these 
files, and disk performance on *both* ends will be the limiting factor. 
Also, your incrementals will likely be almost as long as your fulls.

But if you're making a relatively small number of changes to a relatively 
small number of relatively small files (such as your typical office file 
server), BackupPC will work outstandingly.

This is not to seem that BackupPC is somehow limited.  It's not:  I run it 
on all *kinds* of servers.  But you have to be aware of the limitations. 
*Lots* of files (such as a large mail server that stores each e-mail in 
its own file), very large files that change every day (such as mail 
servers with a monolithic datastore (yes, Exchange, I'm looking at 
*you*)), or simply lots of new data generated daily (things like HPC 
clusters that create *gigabytes* of new data daily) will require special 
attention, design and tuning.

Tim Massey


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