[Box Backup] machinereadble output bbackupquery - help needed

[Peter Jalajas, GigaLock Backup Services]

Hi Chris,

On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 9:43 AM, Chris Wilson <chris@qwirx.com> wrote:
> Hi Pete,
...
> I'm afraid it's the same thing as on the server side in bbstoreaccounts.
> Both sides are simply reading the account info file,
...
OK, _now_ I finally get it.  Thanks for your patience with me!

> I know some people set the soft limit to zero, and therefore only the hard
> limit is useful to them.

Now that is fairly fascinating.  I thought setting Soft to zero would
be just a temporary setting that would be used to clear out your
store.  Doesn't housekeeping delete files to get the Used down to Soft
(zero in this case)?  Relevant links:
http://lists.warhead.org.uk/pipermail/boxbackup-commit/2007-February/000433.html
:
I don't really understand this one.

>From http://www.boxbackup.org/trac/wiki/CertificatesAndAccountsManagement :
The backup client will (voluntarily) try not to upload more data than
is allowed by the soft limit. The store server will refuse to accept a
file if it would take it over the hard limit, and when doing
housekeeping for this account, try and delete old versions and deleted
files to reduce the space taken to below the soft limit.

From: http://www.boxbackup.org/trac/wiki/Troubleshooting
Housekeeping should then remove old and deleted files to bring the
account back under the soft limit, and the next backup run should
upload more files. However, you should ensure that the difference
between the soft and hard limits is enough for the largest file that
you want to upload, otherwise housekeeping will never make enough
space for it.

FWIW, I generally keep a fairly huge gap ("free board?") between my
Soft and Hard limits, shooting for 2 or 3 times the size of the
largest file (usually a few GB Outlook.pst or Exchange backup file; so
I usually give a "free board" between Soft and Hard of 10 or 20 GB),
my thinking being so bbstored has room to efficiently upload that file
and do what it needs to do to make room for it (under the assumption
that that "free board" space is used only briefly and that the account
usage will fairly quickly [a few hours or under a day?] get back down
to the Soft limit).

> I could probably add a switch to show values as a
> percentage of the soft limit if that would help.

Yes, that switch would be helpful, but not at all necessary, and
probably not worth delaying the release.

Thanks again,
Pete