cedric briner wrote:
> 
>> However, any per-client size checking is unrealistically simple because 
>> the server-side space that will be used depends very much on the 
>> uniqueness of the client's files.  That is, if you add a backup of a 
> Who cares that files could be already backup in the pool ? Not the 
> enduser, the enduser only cares about saving his data and being able to 
> get them back. And you as the sysadmin, are a bit more happy, because 
> you have a way to control how much data will be backed up. Which will 
> help you to evaluate your backup system.

I'd expect both of you to care - and for your goals not to be different. 
  It may affect the amount you can back up by orders of magnitude.

> The main problem with my situation is that people have huge amount of 
> data stored, and that we only want to provide backup for important ones. 
> So we let the user to tell backuppc which directory to backup, and each 
> a year we said, we want people beeing able to save 10Gb or 100Gb.
> 
>> large directory where the files are all copies of things already backed 
>> up from other machines it will take very little additional server space.
> yes, but as already said, such things is a nice feature for the sysadmin 
> and not for the enduser.

If you don't account for the space sharing factor (and compression if 
you use it) you can't realistically pick a size to permit.  And things 
can swing wildly either direction.  While files duplicated among users 
take no additional space per instance, files that change even slightly 
between each backup run cause a complete new copy to be stored for each 
  instance you keep on line and might end up taking 10x the space you 
expected on the server.  If you are already running backuppc you can 
probably make a reasonable estimate of the average size you can hold 
but a shift in the data type/usage could throw this off by 100x.

-- 
    Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell AT gmail DOT com


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