[Box Backup] How to get geographic store redundancy right now?

E.W. Peter Jalajas boxbackup@fluffy.co.uk
Tue, 21 Feb 2006 22:28:17 -0800 (PST)


Hi all,

Maybe this is the wrong time, with all the development work going on,
but I wanted to get some pointers for how best to, right now, provide
geographic store redundancy, that is, keeping reasonably similar
versions of the client data in at least 2 locations physically
separated by many miles/kilometers.

I found some conceptual discussions with this google:
http://www.google.com/search?q=+redundancy+OR+%22multiple+stores%22+site%3Alists.warhead.org.uk
and in the wiki:
http://boxbackup.hostworks.ca/index.php/Future_design_changes#8._Server_Redundancy_.28grabbed_from_message_by_Ben_on_9.2F24.2F04.29

But, I'm wondering what I should do right now.  

All of my outside clients are on Windows (my boxes are mixed Windows
and GNU/Linux, mostly Ubuntu).  

I'm not sure at all, but I guess that the best option right now is just
rsyncing the store to a remote server, as frequently as practical,
would work reasonably well (secure, reliable, fairly network and
storage efficient, convenient, fairly easily restorable).  

Is it silly to ask, to give the client user a little more control than
the rsync method above, if it is possible (with maybe 5 or 10 lines of
one-off code tweaking) to run 2 boxbackup services on the Windows
client, pointing each service to separate bbackupd.conf files wherein
the clients are pointed to geographically separated StoreHostname's?  

(Separately, I thought it'd be neat to be able to, someday, have a
bbackupd.conf line like:
     StoreHostname = eastcoast.domain.com  westcoast.domain.com
and have the single bbackupd service make best efforts to backup to
both of them, but I presume that would take quite a bit of coding.)

Thank you!
Pete