That is good to know. Actually things are a little better than I thought, the 
spare machine is Dell Dimension 2400 with a Pentium 4, max 2 gb memory. So I 
guess I could slap a new bigger drive into it and use it. My basic plan is to 
get backups going to one machine and then dupe those to an NAS elsewhere in the 
building. While we have a small staff, our building is 62,000 sq ft with three 
floors, so I can get them physically separated even if not really off site. For 
the web server, we have a two drive raid set up with two spare drive bays. 
Besides backing up with BPC, I would also dupe the drive on a schedule and take 
off site.

I guess I have a plan, so now I'll see about getting BPC installed on it. May 
take awhile, I'm an archaeologist not an IT specialist, but small staffs 
require developing new skills. I've long thought taking that FORTRAN course 
(key punch) in college was one of the smartest things I ever did.

Mike

On Mar 10, 2011, at 1:29 PM, Jeffrey J. Kosowsky wrote:

> Michael Conner wrote at about 12:55:58 -0600 on Thursday, March 10, 2011:
>> Thanks to all who replied. You all basically confirmed my feeling that using 
>> our web server as the backup server was not best practice. I just hoped we 
>> might get by without buying another computer, even though it wouldn't need 
>> to be a very expensive one. The only spare computer we have now is an old XP 
>> box with some type of Celeron processor. Maybe I'll use that to set up a 
>> test system, then get a better one for production.
> 
> One doesn't need a very powerful processor unless one is backing up
> large numbers of machines and huge filesystems. The key limitation is
> typically network bandwidth first, disk I/O speed second, RAM third,
> and CPU only 4th. In fact CPU is really only used for
> compression/decompression (and ssh encryption/decryption if using
> rsync). Even a celeron CPU should be faster than you network bandwidth
> or disk I/O unless again you have things like a high-end SAN and RAID
> system and multiple gigE connections.
> 
> On the other extreme, I have successfully tested running BackupPC to
> backup up my home office server and about half dozen pc's using a SOHO
> NAS with 64 MB RAM and an 800MHz Arm CPU. I also all of the time run a
> second instance of BackupPC on a plugcomputer with a 1.2GHz Arm CPU,
> 512MB DRAM and an external USB hard drive -- that works quite well for
> me even.
> 
> Of course, at certain scales you need more, but you may be surprised
> to find that a celeron box with a RAID1 pair of drives may be good
> enough for you seemingly small installation.
> 
>> 
>> One additional question: are there any advantages to any particular flavor 
>> of Linux for BPC?
> 
> 
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