[Box Backup] BoxBackup Server Side Management Specs (Draft 0.01)

[Chris Wilson]

Hi all,

> Account numbers are rather essential in the design, so will have to 
> stay there. There needs to be a translation layer at some point.

That's a shame. I think that symbolic names would be much more client- and
admin-friendly than account numbers. But what do I know? Might I enquire
about the rationale for using account numbers in the first place?

> That's a good point. How housekeeping will know which account to trim 
> when the group goes over usage is an interesting question though.

Another reason for the client to handle deletion of files, rather than the 
server :-) I would say that the client knows best regarding its own data.

> If you have multiple independent backup servers, then running one 
> daemon on each could be considered beneficial.

I would definitely agree with this. I would even go so far as to 
suggest it for a "backup farm" configuration, as opposed to one big 
central server with lots of NFS mounts or NAS. 

Having a central database would also aid fault tolerance across the farm,
by allowing the use of replication mechanisms to ensure that each backup
server has its own copy of all the critical client details, making the
system more scalable and robust.

Would raidfile/RAID1 be a good way to distribute the backed-up data itself 
between backup servers? Say every server was part of a pair, and backed up 
its client data both to a local disk and to an NFS volume mounted from its 
pair. Then if one server goes down, you can instruct (or DNAT) clients 
into logging into the other server, at which point their files are still 
accessible through the local copy on that server?

Cheers, Chris.
-- 
_ ___ __     _
 / __/ / ,__(_)_  | Chris Wilson <0000 at qwirx.com> - Cambs UK |
/ (_/ ,\/ _/ /_ \ | Security/C/C++/Java/Perl/SQL/HTML Developer |
\ _/_/_/_//_/___/ | We are GNU-free your mind-and your software |