Hi all,
I think that we shouldn't get into exact development details so soon.
Our first decision is to see if it is viable to continue dedicating time
to this project or not, if there are enough people or interest. Once we
decide that we can discuss how to go about it: version to start from,
problems, enhancements,...
I see a clear need for it but I would like to know Craig's position.
@Craig, you are the creator of the product so I would like to know your
position before doing anything. I understand that you have moved on to
other things and have stopped dedicating time to BackupPC, but,
Is that a definite situation?
Do you plan on continuing the development in the future?
Can we count on you if we decide to continue ourselves?
What do you think about the future of BackupPC and how would you
continue if you had the time/resources to do so?
I would also like to set a time out on those questions. Craig hasn't
been responsive in the past months, so If, let's say, at the end of this
week (15th Jan) Craig hasn't answered I would propose to start and email
vote on the version to fork.
I suppose we all agree on managing the project on github, so our next
step would be to decide who starts that project and after that I would
go for a, more or less, agreed list of things to do.
From there it should be easy to just follow the issues and pull
requests and we can discuss how we should make some noise on social
networks or similar to create awareness about the project.
I am open for discussion
Have a nice day :-)
Joe
TSolucio
El 10/01/16 a las 01:25, Michael escribió:
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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