[Box Backup] Alternate server

[Chris Wilson]

Hi Stuart,

On Wed, 23 Apr 2008, Stuart D. Gathman wrote:

> Looking at the overview, the server daemon just keeps files in a tree - 
> and not the real filenames either.  So services like S3 could be the 
> server with some tweaking to use HTTP on the client end.  It is hard to 
> find remote backup software for linux that does both encryption and 
> incremental - so this could be a popular option.

Yes, you are not the first to suggest this and I am planning to implement 
it. The main problems are:

* S3 does not support files over 2GB, so they have to be split up
* S3 is unreliable (frequent failure to write a file, with error 500, that 
  subsequently succeeds if retried)
* S3 does not support the client-server bandwidth efficiency stuff that 
  bbackupd does when talking to bbstored, so you have to run bbstored on 
  an EC2 server
* Testing all this would get expensive for me (monthly charges for an EC2 
  server and S3 account and storage of test data)
* I need to write an S3 emulator for the unit tests

Cheers, Chris.
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