On 4/22/2010 6:53 AM, Saturn2888 wrote:
> I am listing the observations and complaints of mine after using BackupPC for 
> 5 months. My system is running Ubuntu Hardy and has been kept up with the 
> latest updates and patches. I upgraded from 3.0.0 to 3.1.0 within my first 
> few months and have kept this computer solely a BackupPC machine. I've since 
> gone through a few hard drive configurations which I will list here:
> - 3x640GB in hardware RAID3 using an IDE RAID card with SATA ports
> - 3x250GB in Linux software RAID5 using mdadm and onboard SATA ports
> - 1x2TB using onboard SATA ports
> All of those configurations have assured me it is not the speed of the drives 
> themselves which have been giving me any issues. The machine itself has a 
> 3.4GHz P4HT which I have equally tested with and without HyperThreading to no 
> apparent change in usage. The Ethernet NIC is a gigabit broadcom one, and I 
> have both switched the cables the switches with no apparent change in 
> performance as far as I can remember.
>
> Through all my reading of the documentation and many articles about BackupPC 
> which I found using Google, I was able to reconfigure my configuration files 
> to fit the needs of the machines I had and their backup schedules. I was 
> constantly tweaking and changing setting files, but I want to note, I did not 
> see a change in performance, just less error messages such as excluding /dev 
> for instance.
>
> Please feel free, from here on in, to question or assert my obervations and 
> complaints so that we may all get a well-rounded understanding of the 
> situation.
>   
<snip>

BackupPC, being a small community project, does have numerous
limitations and 'issues', if you can call them that. Having used Veritas
and Commvault where funding was available, BackupPC does compare very
nicely in terms of providing basic backup capabilities. The advantage
the commercial vendors have is they can (obviously):

1) Afford to pay a staff of full time developers to enhance their product

2) Gain access to Microsoft's software documentation and code to create
agent specific features for backing up open files (exchange db's, sql
db's, etc.). This also applies to other commercial solutions (Oracle,
VMware, etc.).

Rather than 'complaining' about the state of the software package, you
may want to consider contributing to the code base to make it a better
product. All, if not most of the long time users on this list are very
aware of the issues you have stated in your message. We appreciate the
fact the product exists and is FREE for us to use as an alternative to
commercial solutions.

Feedback is always appreciated. With a project this mature the
developers are very aware of the limitations of the software. You seem
like an intelligent individual. Why not give back something to the
project that has been provided to you and others FREE of charge?

-- 
         Ryan Manikowski


]] Devision Media Services LLC [[
         www.devision.us
 ryan AT devision DOT us | 716.771.2282


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