Re: [BackupPC-users] Noted Observations & Complaints Using BackupPC for 5 mon

[Les M. <les...@gm...>]

Saturn2888 wrote:
>
> @Les Mikesell
> I thought this was the mailing list. I've seen things frequently posted in both areas with replies in both areas. I'm assuming that you mean the mailing list posts to the forums whereas it's not the forum that posts to the mailing list.

It is a bidirectional gateway, but people usually only post beginner questions 
on the forum and then go away, where the people with experience are on the  mail 
list.  The gateway does a bad job of threading and formatting, so it's not the 
best way to get messages to the people likely to answer.

> I apologize, but I do not know how to join or use a mailing list. This is one of those where it's not so easy to find instruction on doing so.

Errr... Push the "info" button here: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/.
And it would also help to break the questions up into different topics per message.

> To me, the mailing list is like this elite corps I'm unable to join because I have no information on it, what it is, or how to gain information on it.

Where did you look?

> RAID5 /is/ slow for write speed, but it can't be less than the speed of 1 drive right?

Yes, it has to write what a single drive would plus read the remaining part of 
the last block, compute parity over it, then write back the parity.  On a small 
write - like all of your directory and inode updates, the  overhead can be more 
than the data.

> I have 2GB of memory in this machine

More would help.

> Would HyperThreading actually make it work faster at all even though most of it is I/O? 

Probably not much difference.

> It used to be that my swap was even on another drive entirely which I can do again if you guys suggest that for speed reasons.

If you are actively using swap just get more ram.

> I don't understand why it's faster to transfer all the content again than use Rsync to see if files need to be redownloaded.

If your network is as fast as your disks, it doesn't slow you down to transfer. 
      And if rsync finds changes, it ends up having to read the original file 
while it merges in the changes, building an new copy so there's twice the disk 
IO plus then I think it has to be compressed again for storage.

> Windows permission locking?

Permissions and locking are two different things - and windows permissions are 
not simple.  See if you can copy a file with smbclient using the same user/password.


> What is --checksum-seed=32761?

See the 'Rsync checksum caching' section of 
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/faq/BackupPC.html.

--
   Les Mikesell
    les...@gm...