Thanks for writing, Kim.

Before going out shopping for hardware, I'd try and determine where your
> performance problem is, ie on the server (due to external USB based
> storage), or on the client.
>

A good point, but either way I need a hardware upgrade.  A single external
hard drive isn't going to cut it.  At the *very* least, I need redundancy
for the pool.  Regardless of any issues on the client, writing to the disk
over USB will become a bottleneck with as much data as there is to back up.
You're right, though, I can probably be pretty modest about any hardware
upgrades.

It does seem to me that you are having a performance issue on the system to
> be backed up, and assuming there isn't all sorts of junk software running on
> the XP Home system that makes rsyncd compete for the already slow disk
> subsystem, I would take a look at the rsyncd installation. (I have seen
> active Antivirus make rsyncd max out a processor)
>

The XP Home system should be fairly clean, but the rsyncd installation is
probably about 3 years old.  Unfortunately, the Linux distro on the server
has gone out of date (I think it's Ubuntu 7.04 or something) and lot of
tools that I would use to measure performance on the server side (e.g.,
iostat, etc.) were not and cannot easily be installed at this point.
Monitoring Windows performance should be pretty straightforward, though.


> I have seen some poor results on *some* Windows XP systems with Cygwin
> myself as well, using the aged 2.6.8 rsyncd package distributed from the
> BackupPC sourceforge site.
>
> There are various guides on getting a more recent cygwin/rsyncd installed
> on Windows, or for a quick switch-and-test you can install DeltaCopy on the
> XP Home system for a quick trial run.
>

Are you saying that the download available from the sourceforge site is not
the best option for giving Windows XP rsync superpowers?  I've never looked
at DeltaCopy; is there consensus that that's a better option than the
sourceforge rsyncd/Cygwin?


> On the hardware for the new server, I pretty much agree with Les - use
> single disk or RAID1 for an uncomplicated fast setup. Stay away from RAID5.
> Drive spindle speed is the main thing you want to focus on, especially if
> the server will be backing up multiple clients simultaneously.
>

There's an idea!  I have a small number of clients; perhaps I should allow
BackupPC to back up only one at a time!
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