Hello,
I've been testing BackupPC 4.0.0alpha3 for 1 year now, for backing up 12
home machines, and to be honest, I'm quite unhappy with it.
To my opinion, it is completely unreliable, you have to regularly check
whether backups are done correctly, and most of the time you can't do a
backup without at least an error. And it's awfully slow. The big
advantage of BPC (besides being free and open-source of course) is to
manage backup of multiple machines in a single pool, hence saving space.
My current backup pool is ~ 12 machine. 11 on Linux and 1 windows
machine. My backup machine is a 3TB Lacie-Cloudbox, with 256 MB memory.
Some of you might say that 256 MB is not enough. Actually I've even seen
posts on the net saying that you would need a server with several GB
RAM. This is just insane. A typical PC in my pool has ~600k files.
Representing each of them with a 256-bit hash, that's basically 20MB of
data to manage for each backup. Of course you need some metadata, etc,
but I see no reason why you need GB of memory to manage that.
If I would participate to the development of BPC, I would make more
changes to the architecture. I think that the changes from 3.0 to 4.0
are very promising, but not enough. The first thing to do is to trash
rsync/rsyncd and use a client-side sync mechanism (like unison). Then
throw away all Perl code and rewrite in C. Also add a timestamp to log
files because debugging BPC failures without timestamps is just a f***
nightmare. And finally make it much more reliable and resistant to
connection issues or interrupt.
What I like in BPC:
- Mutualization of backups in a single pool
- Clean interface
- Free and open-source!
What I hate in BPC:
- BPC seemingly spending more time in backupref_count, fsck or whatever
than in doing actual file transfer.
- Seeing "rsync: read error: Connection reset by peer" in my client log,
followed by even more fsck whatever on the server for ages.
- Not resiliant to interruption, making it very inefficient and unreliable.
- no timestamps in server logs!
- Mostly unhelpful logs.
What I would love to see in BPC:
- Possibility to move the processing (delta) to the client.
- More efficient maintenance, less overhead processing.
- Flawless execution on a 256MB memory server.
Some ideas:
- Use client-side sync and delta detection mechanism (like unison or
duplicity)
- Use ZFS
My gripes and wishes for 2016
Michaël
On 01/07/2016 12:25 AM, Adam Goryachev wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've been a long time user of backuppc (couple of years at least), and
> in general it works really well and I'm mostly happy with the current
> status. However, since I upgraded to the 4.0.0alpha3 last year, I've had
> a number of minor issues (some more serious than others, like failing to
> backup unchanged files, or saying the backup has failed even though it
> succeeded). So far, I've not lost data due to any issue, and that is a
> plus, but I'm very concerned that eventually, one of these problems will
> cause actual data loss (as in, backup failed, something else caused data
> loss like failed RAID array, and then can't recover from backup).
>
> I'd like to know if there is any current person or organisation doing
> development work on BackupPC, and/or interested in doing that? I'm
> considering to fork the project, and try to debug/fix the remaining
> issues in BPC 4, but at the same time, I'm very busy, and am not really
> a "proper" coder, so working on such a large project will be difficult.
>
> With the right group of developers, this could work (as in, a small work
> load for each person, but at least better maintenance/development
> efforts). My concerns are:
> 1) Without ongoing development/maintenance, new versions of OS or perl
> or whatever will cause breakages, while manual/minor patches or config
> changes might solve these, over time it will become more of a nightmare.
> 2) The point of using a "standard" open source product is that we all
> get the advantage of experience (ie, more users finding problems), and
> improvements/patches. I could have built (probably never as good as the
> current BPC) my own solution.
>
> So, are you interested in developing/contributing?
> What is the current status/plans around BPC?
> Do you have any patches that are not applied to either v3 or v4 releases?
> Thoughts/discussions?
>
> PS, BPC is an excellent product, and I greatly appreciate all the time
> and effort that has been invested into it, I would ideally like to see
> it continue under the leadership of Craig, he has done an amazing
> development job so far. I really really do not want to see it basically
> waste away, with people moving to other products simply because it is
> unmaintained, and has a few small problems (which is where I currently
> stand, either I move to another product, or I start working harder on
> the current one).
>
> Regards,
> Adam
>
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