Tino Schwarze wrote: > An SQL approach would be rather complicated because it would have to > support a directory structure. We would end up with ... a filesystem! >
Yes, but SQL databases are not the only game in town. There are other database architectures that would be a good choice for supporting a hierarchical structure, and, although I am not a Perl programmer, I am told by my friends who are into Perl that Perl's superior text-processing capabilities makes databases built solely on text files feasible, without requiring inclusion of or dependencies on another database project. > The nice thing about using hardlinks is that the operating system keeps > track of the link count and we can use that link count to check for > superfluous files. This might be doable in a database as well, but > we'd have to keep a file system and a database in sync. Doable, but > error-prone. With the current design, there is only a file system. > Yes, but there are significant tradeoffs. With the current design, you can't use backuppc effectively to backup a backuppc server - a surprising limitation for arguably the best open-source backup program. You can't use file systems that don't support hardlinks. You can't use 'cloud' storage. I understand that keeping a file system and a database in sync opens the door for error - but there are many techniques that can be used to maximize database integrity at the expense of processing time and memory resources. > Tino, not doing backups of the pool, but archiving hosts to tape. > Yes, but my need, and I am sure, the need of many others, is to do remote backups. Tape works if you are local only. Additionally, tapes are not scaleable (you can't just run out and get a bigger tape if you need one - you have to change your entire tape infrastructure). I urge the developers to consider *adding* a solution that does not depend on hardlinks. Such a solution could be run in parallel with using hardlinks and be backward-compatible. Peter Peter ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ OpenSolaris 2009.06 is a cutting edge operating system for enterprises looking to deploy the next generation of Solaris that includes the latest innovations from Sun and the OpenSource community. Download a copy and enjoy capabilities such as Networking, Storage and Virtualization. Go to: http://p.sf.net/sfu/opensolaris-get _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
