[Box Backup] Re: Boxbackup beginner - Various questions.

[Ben Summers]

On 8 Mar 2006, at 09:40, Tobias Balle-Petersen wrote:

> Hello Ben.
>
>>> I plan to back up 1TB+ of data. Is this feasible with boxbackup?
>>> Theres is
>>> a daily growth of data of about 2GB.
>
>> This should be fine. However, it does depend on how it's all laid
>> out. If it's a few big files, then no problem. But thousands of small
>> files in a single directory can make things a bit sluggish.
>
> Sounds good... If things get "a bit sluggish" it would still run  
> but be "a
> bit slow"?

Should be fine, unless it hits a server timeout. If that happens,  
you'll know, as it will be logged on the server.

>
>
>
>>> I tried to restore with bbackupd running and restore was
>>> painfully slow ?
>
>> It's not the fastest protocol ever, but it shouldn't be "painfully
>> slow".
>
> I restored a users home-folder with 5.5GB data in it. That took 5+  
> hours.
> Is that normal?

Doesn't sound unreasonable.

> It's just that if I have to recover 1TB+ data in the
> future, that would take a very long time.

Large files should be backed up and restored at line speed, it's just  
there's a small, but significant, delay after each file is uploaded  
or downloaded. As a percentage of upload time for small files it's  
quite large, but for large files, small.

I want to remove this in the next version.


> However, the home folder(s) have
> a lot of small cache files that I don't need/want to backup. If I  
> get rid
> of those with a regex, maybe the speed would improve?

It should have quite a useful effect. I use a line like this

     ExcludeDir = /Users/ben/Library/Caches

to exclude the caches.

>
>
>
>
> Thanks for the help with the regex. You suggestion worked out fine.  
> I was
> assuming that the regex'es I can use to list files in the shell etc  
> would
> work in the config file, but I guess it is different interpreter.  
> Sorry.

Are the comments in the bbackupd.conf file insufficient? What would  
we have had to do to help you notice this before?

>
>
>>> I would like to have both onsite and offsite. Would I need to run
>>> two clients with different configurations?
>
>> Yes.
>
>> Or you could rsync the store from the onsite to the offsite server at
>> regular intervals.
>
> In this situation, I would need to stop the boxbackup server before  
> doing
> the rsync right?

No. Just rsync often, and it'll work. If you need to use the remote  
store, there may be minor inconsistencies, which can be fixed using  
bbackupaccounts. All files which have made it there will be  
accessible, even if they're in a lost and found directory.

Ben