[Box Backup] Misc questions about Boxbackup

[Jérôme Schell]

Hi all,

I am currently testing Boxbackup on Linux to see if it is suitable for 
our needs. I have several questions.

I made Debian packages for Boxbackup to simplify the installation, so I 
wrote initialisation scripts to start and stop the server and client 
daemons.
I have a little problem with bbackupd. When I try to stop it via my 
script (in fact sending a signal 15) while it is in the process of 
sending files to the server, it doesn't stop. I see in the log :
bbackupd[2090]: Exception caught (7/41), reset state and waiting to retry...
If I stop it again it really exits but if there are child processes, I 
am afraid of not being able to stop anything without sending the fatal 
SIGKILL :)

Another thing I am wondering of is if boxbackup preserves ACL. This 
could be useful in certain cases but I think ACLs are not very 
"standard" accross platform so it should be difficult.

What kind of userland RAID is boxbackup using? Is it RAID 1 or RAID 5. I 
would say RAID 5 as it needs 3 disks. And, in fact, can it be more than 
3 disks? (I know it is possible to create more than one disc set, but I 
would like to know why 3 disks :) )

Is it possible to limit the number of revisions of files? I mean rather 
than beginning to delete old revisions of files only when the storage is 
full, also begin to delete when the number of revisions for the file is 
reaching a certain number.

Would it be possible to have a global daemon running as root and to 
allow per-user configuration. For exemple each user would have in his 
home directory a .boxbackup directory that would contain his own 
bbackupd.conf (maybe with not all the options of the global one) and 
private key/certificate/encrypt key files. This way we wouldn't have to 
run bbackupquery as root and individual users could backup/restore 
without root intervention. This would probably imply to regularly launch 
a child process of bbackupd that would run as the user. This way the 
user daemon wouldn't be able to read other user's files ;). Users would 
also probably need access to a bbackupd socket to be able to use 
bbackupctl. Do you see any objection that would prevent such behavior?

And last (for now) but not least, we need to implement a GUI to add 
"user friendly touch" to boxbackup :). I am wondering if we should just 
encapsulate calls to bbackupquery and bbackupctl or if there is a way to 
use the C++ classes as a library that would provide transparent access 
to the boxbackup server (this is just a thought, I didn't yet look at 
the code :) ).

Sorry, this was a bit long, but I think boxbackup is worth it :)
And Ben thank you for your great work on boxbackup!
-- 
Jérôme