Re: Estimate number of users for Back In Time
On Tue, Sep 10, 2024 at 01:43:29PM +0000, c.buhtz@posteo.jp wrote:
> X-Post on Reddit r/debian [1]
>
> Hello,
>
> I am not the founder but current member of the maintenance team of "Back In
> Time" [2][3], an rsync-based backup tool for GNU/Linux available in Debian
> GNU/Linux since 2009.
>
> I try to estimate how many (Debian) users we do have. I am aware that this
> is very difficult and also unsharp. I would like to have your opinion about
> some influencing factors.
>
> - Back In Time (BIT) is in Debian since 2009. Debian itself and its derivats
> do have a big user base. So BIT might have, too. But how big is big?
> - I know about popcon [4], Debians own statistics about package
> installations. But I am not sure how to interpret and extrapolate this
> values. What you can cleary see on the popcon data is the peek around year
> 2022. In that year the current team reanimated the project after being
> nearly dead for round about 5 years. Is this peek caused by new
> installations or just by upgrading existing packages because we released new
> versions of it?
> - Another factor are alternative backup solutions around GNU/Linux distros.
>
> Any idea or estimates from you? I am even not sure if we do talk about a 5-
> or 6-digits number. Or even just a 4-digtis one?
Popcon report 0.38% . This does not seem much, but assuming popcon data is
representative of the ecosystem, given the number of Linux users, this is
a lot.
Ubuntu desktop claims to have 6 millions users. 0.38% is 22800 users.
Another estimation gives 38 millions Linux users. 0.38% is 144400 users.
I do not know enough about Back In Time users to know whether popcon should be
expected to be biaised for or against Back In Time, but this gives an
indication.
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
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