On Wed, 16 May 2012, Jeffrey J. Kosowsky wrote: > I have been an active user and contributor to the BackupPC community > for almost 5 years now, including reading the email list religiously > and writing a fair amount of code and I must say that this is the > first time I have *ever* heard of this BackupPC extension. Even > googling, there is very little information on the program other than > that it is a portable client for BackupPC which perhaps specifically > target Windows. No one seems to have even mentioned BackupPCd since > maybe 2008. In fact, the last posts from 2007/2008 all ask about it > being dead back then. The current site link seems to consist of little > more than code and a change log.
I confess that I knew that BackupPCd existed, but only because I looked at it while writing the BackupAFS fork. It was quite instructive. > So, I am curious: > > 1. What is the use case for a specialized/proprietary BackupPC client > when BackupPC natively supports so many different transfer methods > now? Is it more a relic from the times when it was harder to get > rsync working on Windows or when the Samba transfer method was less > reliable? I've been using BackupPC since 2005 and still use it. Overall it works very well for me. That said, it does have some warts and is *always* a pain to me when I am upgrading the disks in one of my backuppc servers. As for BackupPCd, I think the idea was to have something that was easy for end-users to install on clients without jumping through the cygwin, rsync and smb hoops (and when if a *nix version of BackupPCd appeared, without going through all of the ssh and sudoers steps). Client setup is pretty simple for a vetran admin who's familiar with BackupPC or who has lots of other experience under his belt. But for the newbie, setup can be a bear with lots of places to go wrong. I'm not saying that the setup is fragile, just that it can be complex. In addition to simplifying client setup, there was talk about better interfacing with the client (status of the backup being available to the client, possibly restoring via the client) and being able to backup and restore NTFS and POSIX acls. All of that is difficult (impossible?) without a native client. If the client could interface with native storage management utils (VSS on windows, LVM on linux, etc) without lots of scripting, it would probably make BackupPC appealing to a much wider audience. > 2. How many people are actually using this software? I would imagine > the numbers must be quite small given that I can't recall a single > post about BackupPCd in perhaps 4 years. Probably near zero. > 3. Is this the best use of BackupPC community resources? My bigger > concern is the development status of BackupPC itself. It's been > quite a while since Craig has popped on the list and I haven't > heard anything about the status and prospects for BackupPC 4.x in a > long time. Meanwhile, development and even active bug fix releases > have stopped for 3.x. So, if there are spare developer resources, > we might want to think first about the core BackupPC tree. Like most projects, once it reaches maturity and works for most people, development slows. This is especially true if the development is done by someone in their spare time and not sponsored or underwritten by someone who can fund new features. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if Craig jumped in at some point in the future with a 4.0 beta release with lots of new features. :-) Cheers, Stephen ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ BackupPC-devel mailing list [email protected] List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-devel Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
