>You can tell a user "you must bring your laptop into work every X days,
>connect it to the local LAN, and leave it connected for at least Y hours"
>(where Y is your average backup duration plus some amount of time
>sufficient to process the difference between the average number of
>simultaneous 'new' laptops on the LAN and your MaxBackups), but few of them
>will actually do it.
I'm coming late to this discussion, but i'm one who has given up on backing up
laptops.
I tell users that if they have important data (things they would miss if their
laptop caught on fire) they had better be writing it to a Network Drive (while
on the VPN or LAN) or their My Documents (which is synced to a network share
anyway (AD offline files)).
Anything else tends just to be programs and such. YMMV though and you may have
special needs. I'm not gonna presume to know your whole situation.
-Tony
> program to wakeup much more frequently and skip the standard blackout
> period. when a host comes online, it broadcasts on the local network that
> arrival and i think we could get backuppc to monitor that broadcast and do
> an immediate backup of that machine based on the standard criteria. some
> 'smarts' should be included to keep from having extra backups done because
> of network disconnects and such.
>
> the solution could be a helper daemon that watches for the broadcasts and
> also does some broadcasts itself, reads the config file for that host and
> the main config file and sends the backup command to backuppc. could be
> done in a bash script but perl might be a bit better. any ideas on this??
Sounds like almost as much work as I did. ;-) Seriously, if you want me to
describe what I did in those same simple terms, it's "Why not use some
other backup application, like Unison, that can be user-initiated and
which, because it can work over an SSH tunnel, can operate from virtually
anywhere in the world, to actually back up the laptops of 'road warriors'
to a local server? BackupPC could then be configured to backup each
laptop's Unison directory from that server. Some 'smarts' should be
included to make sure they don't step on each others' toes."
My instructions just tell you how to do that and the scripts try to make
sure that the two applications aren't operating on the same directory at
the same time with some status flags. I also assume that the same server
will be used for both Unison cache and BackupPC, but you don't need to if
you have a fast interconnect between the 2...
I happen to really like Unison. If you've never used it, it has a decent
gui and gives the user a percent-done for each changed file or directory
while it works. Positive feedback to end-users is almost always a good
thing.
In closing, if you have a better solution for backing up laptops that are
outside the local LAN, let's hear it. If you have suggestions for
clarifying my instructions, email them to me; if they're clearer than mine
I'll probably use them. If you think what I describe is too complicated for
you, don't do it. No one will twist your arm and force you to implement it.
(OK, *I* won't, I don't know who you work for. :-)
Cheers, Stephen
--
Stephen Joyce
Systems Administrator P A N I C
Physics & Astronomy Department Physics & Astronomy
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Network Infrastructure
voice: (919) 962-7214 and Computing
fax: (919) 962-0480 http://www.panic.unc.edu
<http://www.panic.unc.edu/>
Don't anthropomorphize computers. They hate that.
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