Thanks for the helpful and informative response. I learned something!
Post by s***@physics.unc.eduPost by Jeffrey J. KosowskyI have been an active user and contributor to the BackupPC community
for almost 5 years now, including reading the email list religiously
and writing a fair amount of code and I must say that this is the
first time I have *ever* heard of this BackupPC extension. Even
googling, there is very little information on the program other than
that it is a portable client for BackupPC which perhaps specifically
target Windows. No one seems to have even mentioned BackupPCd since
maybe 2008. In fact, the last posts from 2007/2008 all ask about it
being dead back then. The current site link seems to consist of little
more than code and a change log.
I confess that I knew that BackupPCd existed, but only because I looked at
it while writing the BackupAFS fork. It was quite instructive.
Post by Jeffrey J. Kosowsky1. What is the use case for a specialized/proprietary BackupPC client
when BackupPC natively supports so many different transfer methods
now? Is it more a relic from the times when it was harder to get
rsync working on Windows or when the Samba transfer method was less
reliable?
I've been using BackupPC since 2005 and still use it. Overall it works very
well for me. That said, it does have some warts and is *always* a pain to
me when I am upgrading the disks in one of my backuppc servers.
As for BackupPCd, I think the idea was to have something that was easy for
end-users to install on clients without jumping through the cygwin, rsync
and smb hoops (and when if a *nix version of BackupPCd appeared, without
going through all of the ssh and sudoers steps). Client setup is pretty
simple for a vetran admin who's familiar with BackupPC or who has lots of
other experience under his belt. But for the newbie, setup can be a bear
with lots of places to go wrong. I'm not saying that the setup is fragile,
just that it can be complex.
In addition to simplifying client setup, there was talk about better
interfacing with the client (status of the backup being available to the
client, possibly restoring via the client) and being able to backup and
restore NTFS and POSIX acls. All of that is difficult (impossible?) without
a native client. If the client could interface with native storage
management utils (VSS on windows, LVM on linux, etc) without lots of
scripting, it would probably make BackupPC appealing to a much wider
audience.
Post by Jeffrey J. Kosowsky2. How many people are actually using this software? I would imagine
the numbers must be quite small given that I can't recall a single
post about BackupPCd in perhaps 4 years.
Probably near zero.
Post by Jeffrey J. Kosowsky3. Is this the best use of BackupPC community resources? My bigger
concern is the development status of BackupPC itself. It's been
quite a while since Craig has popped on the list and I haven't
heard anything about the status and prospects for BackupPC 4.x in a
long time. Meanwhile, development and even active bug fix releases
have stopped for 3.x. So, if there are spare developer resources,
we might want to think first about the core BackupPC tree.
Like most projects, once it reaches maturity and works for most people,
development slows. This is especially true if the development is done by
someone in their spare time and not sponsored or underwritten by someone
who can fund new features. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if Craig
jumped in at some point in the future with a 4.0 beta release with lots of
new features. :-)
Cheers,
Stephen
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