[mbackup-devel] MBackup questions

[Brent B. P. <mb...@b2...>]

Greetings. As I was getting frustrated with backup the other night, I
sat down and started drawing up plans for yet another gpl backup
system. Luckily (I hope), I took a look-see at source forge and found
this project before I got too deep, including too deep into some of
the issues (which may well be reflected below). Thus, before I sign up
as a developer, the big and obvious questions:

1.) Docs? Even a start at docs?
2.) Specs? Even a start at specs?

3.) How is a particular file selected for backup? Personally, I would
hope that this would be a module, so that one could implement a
'tower-of-hanoi' structure, or a 'full' structure, or a 'new'
structure, via a relatively simple module, or, in the case of the
first, a somewhat complex module.

4.) MySQL? Not to be rude, but, oh please. OK, just what is the DB
used for? [[ And, of course, why isn't it again modularized, so that I
could at least take advantage of the Sybase and Oracle servers that I
have? ]]

5.) Speaking of which, has any thought been given to how to backup a
live db server? This might require an NDA or some sort of agreement
with the vendor...

6.) Which inexorably leads to: How are the modules organized? How does
the driver program 'know' what module to call, in what order to call
them, what the purpose of a particular module is, and where that
module might be found?

7.) Where do modules run? Where does 'the program' run? If, for
instance, over the top, I have a tape drive connected to the scsi port
of a sparc-linux box, does the mbackup server run on that machine? How
could that tape drive be used to backup the files of a network
attached Win2500 system?

8.) Finally, what are the plans for a.) archiving onto multiple backup
media; or b.) archiving multiple backup sets onto a single backup
medium; and finally, c.) Juke boxes ? 

I realize that this is a long list of questions, but I can probably
start slogging some spare cycles into this  relatively quickly, at
least until the end of the year.

Cheers.