Dan D Niles writes: > How hard would it be to implement something that balances when full > backups are done? > > BackupPC is perfecly happy doing full backups of most hosts one night, > and no full backups the next night. Amanda, as an example, tries > to balance full backups so about the same amout of data is backed up > each night. With amanada, this is mostly to optimize tape usage. > It would be useful for BackupPC when you are backing up a lot of hosts > and want to limit backups to only nighttime. > > Right now, I have a night where a bunch of full backups occur and on > that night some incrementals get skipped because there just isn't > enough time. I could adjust in manually by forcing fulls of some > of the hosts, but that is a pain. Besides, power outages and such > will tend to cluster the full backups together so it would require > periodic adjustment. > > It would be really nice to have the full backups spread out > automatically.
Good idea. I'll add it to the todo list. The challenge is that I think it is difficult to describe this behavior with a config parameter, and implementing it would be quite difficult. One issue: do you want all machines spread evenly over 7 days, or do you want more of them lumped in the evenings or weekends? How would you concisely specify that? Another issue: if you add a new machine then it should be backed up ASAP. So it would only be subject to resheduling once it had some backups. I need to think about this some more. One simple approach is to dither the full backup times by some random amount. The resulting random walk would spread the times out after a couple of weeks. But I think that would annoy the typical admin or user. Craig ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: Tame your development challenges with Apache's Geronimo App Server. Download it for free - -and be entered to win a 42" plasma tv or your very own Sony(tm)PSP. Click here to play: http://sourceforge.net/geronimo.php _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
