Re: [BackupPC-users] Large deployment questions

[Ski K. <kac...@co...>]

John,

I only backup the home directories and some shared directories in 
/usr/local.  For OSX I use xtar as before 10.4.? the native tar did not 
support resource forks.  You cannot use rsync either because it does not 
support resource forks either.  If you do not care about resource forks 
on OSX, rsync should work.  Problem is that many applications (e.g. MS 
Office) use resource forks to store the type of file if the user does 
not save the file as a *.doc.  When these are restored and the resource 
fork is lost you have to rename the files by hand to get MS Office to 
recognize them.  Not bad for a few files, but for hundreds from 
different applications it is a nightmare.

I found that I could start all the clients at once and over a period of 
a few weeks, they distributed their backups pretty equally around the 
clock.  I have it set up so clients that are on all the time are blacked 
out during the daytime (so the laptops which on off and on the network 
have a better chance of getting backed up).  Try to have all clients use 
the same config file for simplicity (or at least one config file per 
type of machine).  I use the ability to overlay config files (e.g. put a 
config file in the machine's directory for my VIP machines.

Biggest issues I have had are changing IP - machine names (I use dynamic 
dns and the laptops are a bear) and large restores for some reason often 
need to be done in chunks.  These are minor considering that the system 
is backing up 1500 older Macs and we are restoring about 10 a week as 
due to system failures.

Oh, one other thing that really helped was I wrote a quick web app that 
reads the backuppc data files on disk and allows users to see if their 
machine has been backed up recently.  We do not allow users to perform 
their own restores because of company policy, so this is a way for them 
to feel confident that their machine is being backed up.

cheers,

ski



John Pettitt wrote:
> 
> We're considering using BackupPC at work (~50 desktops, mixed OSX, 
> Windows, Linux growing to over 100 machines within 6 months) - I've been 
> using it at home (Win, OSX, FreeBSD) for over a year and I'm really 
> happy with it.   
> 
> Anyway the point of this post ....
> 
> Does anybody have any advice on best practices for larger deployments?
> 
> What do you backup on each desktop? (at home I backup everything)
> 
> We're thinking rsync over ssh for the OSX and Linux boxes and smb for 
> Windows - good plan?
> 
> Any reason not to start with 3.00 beta2
> 
> What issue going to bite us unexpectedly?
> 
> 
> John Pettitt
> 
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-- 
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it
  connected to the entire universe"            John Muir

Chris "Ski" Kacoroski, kac...@co..., 206-501-9803