Bug#346606: ITP: personalbackup -- Company-wide solution for backing up machines and shares.
Hello,
Let me try to explain in more detail:
The main purpose of the PersonalBackup suite is to take backups of data
from Windows machine by making use of Samba. However
Samba shares on linux boxes can also be backed up ofcourse.
The suite has a web frontend and currently uses a PostgreSQL database
backend. The main code is written in Perl. For the web frontend
I am making use of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Java applets.
To be able to back up data from a windows machine the end user needs to
create a read-only share, and register the share via the webinterface
with PersonalBackup.
From then on PersonalBackup will visit the machine every day (if
possible) and it will backup the necessary data.
The data is being stored on the PersonalBackup server by making use of
hardlinks. This is in fact the power of PersonalBackup.
It will only store the "real" differences between seperate backup sets.
If a file did not change on the end users machine, only a hardlink will
be created locally.
By using this approach PersonalBackup also does not need a "Full" backup
to start with.
Because of this ever incremental approach PersonalBackup will start
backing up where it left of if it was not possible to tranfer the
complete share in 1 day.
For the end users it seems that every day a "Full" backup is being taken
from their registered shares..but in fact PersonalBackup is only copying
the data that is really changed.
This approach reduces both bandwith & storage.
On your questions:
- Is client software needed to back up non-critical data?
-> No, there is no need at all to install additional software on the machines that will be backed up.
- Which network protocol is used for the backup?
-> SMB, I am making use of the perl module Filesys::SmbClient, which is a wrapper around the smbclient.so API of the Samba suite.
- What privileges are necessary?
-> The PersonalBackup daemon needs to run as super user (root)
The web frontend is running as default user (apache,nobody,...)
- Are the backups generated fully restoreable?
-> Yes, for the user it seems that every time the PersonalBackup system has backed up his/her machine it has taken a "Full" backup.
With the web frontend the users can even get back their data just by downloading it.
- What about the registry?
-> This question I do not understand, what do you exactly mean with registry ?
Thanks in advance for your effort!
Best Regards,
Kim Kuylen
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