[BackupPC-users] Q: Server spec for small BackupPC Deployment

[Tim C. <tch...@gm...>]

Hi folks,

I wanted to ask for comments / guidance: I have reviewed the FAQ but
I'm not sure about 'real world' implication so if anyone can comment
("yes should work, I've done it" or "no, no no!" :-) - pointers are
appreciated.

Context:  Small office site (daycare) with 4 windows workstations,
approx 50gigs of data to backup in total across all machines, and slow
incremental growth expected on disk footprint over next 3-5 years.  (A
single 3 Megapixel digital camera is the main source of disk footprint
I think, on a single workstation..! Otherwise it is mainly assorted
MS-Office documents and PDFs and suchlike..).  Desire is to have a
backup solution that 'works smoothly in the background' to provide
peace-of-mind in case a disk fails, files are deleted by accident, or
suchlike.  There is low growth potential here in terms of absolute #
of workstations / clients - ie - that will not change, I think, in the
lifespan of this backup server.

Intent: I have a generic whitebox PC P3-933 with 512mb ram, into which
I'll put a PCI sata card, and then attach 2 x 1 Tb Seagate Sata
drives. On top of this, install CentOS 5.2/32bit and then do software
raid-1 mirror on the 2 volumes, so I expect to have ~900gigs of usable
space for the backupPC slice.  The disk is "over capacity" because
they want to have room for this server for a ~5 year lifespan, and
given current disk prices, it makes little sense to get anything
smaller than 1 Tb drives, I think.

The LAN connecting these systems is vanilla 100mb ether, although
upgrade to gig-ether is possible - but I'm not sure it really is
merited. Obvious would put a gig-ether nic the backupPC box if this
was to happen.

Backup plan, would be to do monthly full and nightly incrementals, or
something like that. Possibly 2 concurrent sessions, although with so
few clients it really doesn't matter much I think.

So - the basic question:  Should I expect BackupPC to run smoothly on
hardware of this vintage ? Will it suffer too much from a low-power
CPU ? Would it run significantly smoother on something less ancient (I
might be able to get a P4-2ghz system for this role, for example).
This is a low-budget project (I'm donating my time to setup
everything, and they are buying the HDDs; and using a freebie PC for
the server)... but I'm trying to give them something decent for their
needs.

Any comments / suchlike -- are appreciated.

Thanks,

Tim