Sorry for the late reply.

anything/everything in a VM is an attraction.  :-)  

I had hoped for a pre-configured VM appliance so I could easily evaluate it.  I did not have such an easy implementation experience (as evidenced by apparent exhaustion of this listserv during the process).  Being able to download, "turn on", and make a few modifications to implement in an environment is a good way to promote good software.  Seems that a VM would serve just fine in smaller environments (including home use), and should it need to grow beyond the performance capacity of a VM, then one could move to a physical solution.

In the case of a S.B.H. event (Smoking Black Bole), that's what I would have it configured as an off-site iSCSI target (I have the benefit of dark fiber).  Similarly, as a VM, I can replicate the BackupPC appliance offsite as well, thus my DR site would have all the backups, and a VM copy to mount and use it.

Good to know about rSync - thanks.

On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 4:17 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell AT gmail DOT com> wrote:

On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 3:07 PM, Bryan Keadle (.net) <bkeadle AT keadle DOT net> wrote:
>
> I just recently been introduced to BackupPC and I've been pursuing this as a
> VM appliance to backup non-critical targets.  Thus, as a VM, I would use
> remote storage (iSCSI) to provide capacity instead of local virtual disk.

That can work, but given the ease of apt-get or yum installs on any
linux system, what's the attraction of a VM?  You'll get a lot of
overhead for not much gain.   And if you end up sharing physical media
with the source targets, you shouldn't even call it a backup.

> Les - as for the offsite copies of the archive, you're speaking of a backup
> of the backup.  For the purpose that BackupPC provides, non-critical data,
> I'm not so concerned with backing up the backup.

What's your plan for a building disaster?  If it is 'collect the
insurance and retire' then you probably don't care about offsite
copies...

>  However, should BackupPC
> start holding backups that I would need redundancy for, what do you
> recommend?  What are you doing?  Since I'm thinking SAN-based storage for
> BackupPC, I figured I would just use SAN-based replication.

If you aren't sharing the media with the data you are trying to
protect, that would work.   But, if you have the site-to-site
bandwidth for that, it would be much cheaper to just run the backups
over rsync from a backuppc server at the opposite site.    I have
mostly converted to that approach now, but an older setup that is
still running has a 3-member RAID1 where one of the drives is swapped
out and re-synced weekly.   These were initially full sized 750 Gig
drives, but I'm using a laptop size WD (BLACK - the BLUE version is
too slow...) for the offsite members now.   Other people do something
similar with LVM mirrors or snapshot image copies.

>  But should that
> not be wise or available, would you just stand up an rSync target and just
> rSync /var/lib/BackupPC to some offisite target?

The number of hardlinks in a typical backuppc archive make that a
problem or impossible  at some point because rsync has to track and
reproduce them by inode number, keeping the whole table in memory.
I think a zfs snapshot with incremental send/receive might work, but
you'd need freebsd or solaris instead of linux for that.

--
    Les Mikesell
       lesmikesell AT gmail DOT com

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