lmirguet AT microworld DOT org wrote at about 16:23:53 +0200 on Tuesday, May 
17, 2011:
 > Hello backuppc-users,
 > 
 > I would like to backup all the machines of my company (12 laptops,
 > Windows/Mac/Linux) in a centralized way on a NAS device.
 > I like a lot BackupPC and if possible I would like to use it to run the
 > backups.
 > 
 > Now comes the choice of the NAS... What NAS device would you recommend with
 > a good ratio "performance / easy to install BackupPC on it" ?
 > 
 > The ideal situation would be a NAS with BackupPC pre-installed - or a NAS
 > with some available BackupPC packages ready to deploy.
 > I looked at Synology / QNap / WD Sharespace but in each case the install of
 > BackupPC seems tedious, and I'm not sure of the performances I will get on
 > such devices...
 > 

For 12 laptops (which is all things considered a small setup), you
could probably get by with either of the following approaches. I
actually am implementing both now in my SOHO setup (the first is my
primary setup, the second is my backup backup setup)

1. [Easiest] Run Backuppc on a normal (even low end) x86 PC and mount
   the NAS as a storage drive. I do this using NFS (but others have
   suggested using iSCSI or "SATA over Internet"). This requires next
   to no special configuration if your NAS supports (or can be made to
   support) NFS or other similar technologies.

2. [Harder] Run BackupPC native on the NAS. I have done this on
   arm-based NAS's (including a DNS-323) by installing debian and then
   running backuppc on debian. The only potentially difficult part
   here is installing debian (or other multi-purpose linux distro) if
   it is not already native on the device. Some NAS's may already have
   a working linux install. (Other people have installed BackupPC on
   the DNS-323 directly but I shied away from that since the native OS
   implementation on the DNS-323 is limited and old).

   Note that there are a couple of subtle bugs in the ARM-based
   implementation of the perl md5sum and rsync libraries that cause
   inconsistencies between arm and x86 pools -- this doesn't cause any
   real problems if you always keep your pool on an arm-based
   system. If you want to know how to fix those bugs I have posted
   solutions on the mailing list (search the archives).

If you run BackupPC on a normal PC and mount the NAS then your rate
limiting step is likely to be network bandwidth assuming that your PC
is reasonably powered. However, since most NAS's can support gigE this
shouldn't be a limitation if you have a gigE connection between your
PC-based BackupPC server and the NAS. Note, I get by sharing the same
100MHz Ethernet connection as all my pc's using a low end switch &
router.

If you run BackupPC natively on a SOHO NAS, then your rate limiting
step is likely to be CPU power and to a lesser extent RAM since many
of the low end devices run on 1.2 GHz ARM-based CPU with 512MB
DRAM. However, I have successfully run BackupPC on the DNS-323 which
has a lowly *500MHz* ARM cpu with a measly *64K* of DRAM. The
limitation. The limitation will be apparent with compression, ssh, and
the rsync algorithm.

With a small number of laptops (you mention just 12) and assuming that
you don't have a huge number of files changing every day, you should
be able to get by even with compression turned on as long as you have
a long enough backup window. Also, if backups are taking too long you
could change the backup interval so that backups occur only every
other day or so.

The bottom line is that BackupPC is not particularly resource
intensive and will work with very minimalist systems. In most normal
situations, the rate limiting step is disk speed anyway which has
nothing to do with NAS vs. PC.

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