BackupPC-users

Re: [BackupPC-users] Backing up a BackupPC server

2009-06-02 09:00:31
Subject: Re: [BackupPC-users] Backing up a BackupPC server
From: Stephen Joyce <stephen AT physics.unc DOT edu>
To: "General list for user discussion, questions and support" <backuppc-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net>
Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2009 08:26:23 -0400 (EDT)
I'd like to see BackupPC adopt an asynchronous transactional replication scheme for replicating servers. Given the way BPC uses the underlying filesystem, it seems the most robust and flexible choice.

Cyrus Imapd (which can scale to at least hundreds of thousands of users and millions of mailboxes) chose this model of replication over 5 years ago and once setup, it works pretty well.

Details at:
http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/imapd/install-replication.html
http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/~dpc22/cyrus/replication.html

Feel free to discuss, or to move to backuppc-devel.

--
Cheers,
Stephen

On Tue, 2 Jun 2009, Tino Schwarze wrote:

On Tue, Jun 02, 2009 at 06:27:35AM -0400, Peter Walter wrote:

As a Linux newbie, I have only a partial understanding of the technology
underlying Linux and BackupPC, but I get the impression that the problem
with a rsync-like solution is that processing hardlinks is very
expensive in terms of cpu time and memory resources. This may be a
stupid question, but, if hardlinks are the problem, has any thought been
given to adding to BackupPC an option to use some form of database
(text, SQL or otherwise) to associate hashes to files, instead? It seems
to me that using hardlinks is in fact using that feature of the file
system *as* a database, a use that does not appear to be optimal ... if
I have misunderstood, please educate me :-)

An SQL approach would be rather complicated because it would have to
support a directory structure. We would end up with ... a filesystem!
The nice thing about using hardlinks is that the operating system keeps
track of the link count and we can use that link count to check for
superfluous files. This might be doable in a database as well, but
we'd have to keep a file system and a database in sync. Doable, but
error-prone. With the current design, there is only a file system.

Tino, not doing backups of the pool, but archiving hosts to tape.

--
"What we nourish flourishes." - "Was wir nähren erblüht."

www.lichtkreis-chemnitz.de
www.craniosacralzentrum.de
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