[BackupPC-users] hardware and configuration recommendations for speed?

Hello,

I've just gotten authorization to build a new back up solution for a client, and I was hoping for some suggestions from the list. To summarize, I guess I'm looking for the answers to three questions:

What is the optimal transfer method for my situation?
What is the optimal hardware configuration for my situation?
If BackupPC is not a good solution for the troublesome machine detailed below, what should I use instead?

Previously, I'd used BackupPC on a spare tower for this client -- let me just call them a customer; client has too many meanings! It works well for all the customer's clients except one, and unfortunately this machine is the most important one to back up. The machine in question (let's call it RED5) runs Windows XP Home, and backups are done via rsyncd on Cygwin. (Most other machines on the network are using SMB, but this is not an option as XP Home won't let you assign permissions to your share -- either you share with everyone or you don't share at all.) Upgrading the operating system is an option if that makes a difference in your recommendations.

The last successful full backup of RED5 took just over 8 hours. 37,457 files totaling just under 25 GB were backed up at a rate of 0.87 MB/sec. RED5 is a laptop, and it's only on the network for about 8 hours per day, so I have to be able to do better than this. I like SMB for the other clients on the network because the configuration is simpler, but I've been led to believe that rsyncd is generally faster for Windows clients. Is this true? If so, are there any rsyncd-related configuration options I should be tweaking to increase performance?

On to the hardware: The current BackupPC server is not a dedicated machine; I plan to change that with the new machine, so right away I should see some improvements in performance. The tower is running on a single hard drive, which is living a little more dangerously than I'd like. I want hard disk redundancy via RAID on the new machine, but I understand RAID5 is slow for writes and I don't know much about the different possible RAID configurations. I think the hard drive is part of the bottleneck in the old system; the BackupPC pool lives on an external USB drive. I've read that for increased performance, it's recommended that the pool be on a separate disk from the operating system -- does this also apply for RAIDed systems? On BackupPC systems, where do the bottlenecks tend to be: hard drive, memory, processor, network?

Lastly, am I wrongheaded in trying to solve this problem with BackupPC? Is there a better solution for a transient host with this much data to back up?

Thanks,
-Frank

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