[Box Backup] BoxBackup Server Side Management Specs (Draft0.01)

[Ben Summers]

On 22 Sep 2004, at 13:47, richard_eigenmann wrote:

> The following comes to mind when thinking about group backups:
>
> Consider the situation where we have a department with say 10 
> workstations
> that we would like to have a full backup of from the root of each 
> machine's
> filesystem (assume a version of a widely used operating system). The
> directories will be filled for large parts with bloatware that can be 
> found
> on most other machines albeit in different locations. Theoretically it 
> would
> be sufficient to back up all this stuff just once but allow restore to 
> each
> client that held the file at the time in question.
>
> If we implemented such a kind of "backup recognition" algorythm this 
> could
> speed up backups of remote laptops as perhaps the documents the laptop 
> user
> has been working on have already been backed up from users back at the 
> base.
>
> I imagine this sort of feature could save somewhere between 0.5 and 5 
> GB per
> workstation that is doing a full backup. This could be significant to 
> the
> scalability of the boxbackup.
>
> Of course this sort of thing probably would lead to massive 
> redevelopment of
> code and should only be undertaken if there is a very strong demand. I 
> for
> one don't need it.

I would have thought that in such a department you would have a means 
of recreating the workstations very quickly, perhaps using Ghost for 
Windows or a custom installer for UNIX. In which case you'd only need 
to back up the data.

Ben