I've written a little tool to help analyze BackupPC "scheduling" that I thought others might find useful. It is meant to generate plots that can be viewed from the web, but it's just as easily used from the command line.
https://github.com/ravenx99/backuppc-visualize/ Over the past year+ that we've been using BackupPC at my company, we've struggled with getting all our machines backed up every 24 hours. We have over 60 Linux and Windows hosts, and over half of those are virtual machines all attached to a single EMC storage server, and a single full backup of all the hosts is at 2 TB of data after dedupe. Because of the load backups create on our VMs, our default is to blackout 6 AM to 6 PM, and then allow only trivial machines to back up during the day. We restrict the number of concurrent backups to 3, due to the serious load it creates on a VM host when more than one of its guests is being backed up at the same time. This has caused a problem with getting backups of critical machines on a 24-hour cycle. In order to see how the backups are interacting, I wrote BackupPC-Visualize to create a broken-bar plot (a "timeline") indicating the time during which each backup ran over the last N days. This aggregate view of the data quickly identified our problem machines. (Our solution has been to use cron to force the full backups of problem machines to run on the weekend. A kludge, and I'd like to find a more elegant solution.) bpcviz consists of a simple Perl script that gathers and massages the /var/lib/backuppc/pc/<host>/backups data, and a Ploticus plot script to convert the data to visual form. I tried to use Gnuplot initially, but it won't do horizontal plots, and it handles multiple-interval time data very poorly (via a kludge). Let me know if you find it useful, and I'm open to considering feature requests... you can open an "issue" on Github tagged as "enhancement", or just drop me an email if Github is a barrier for you. (I hope the author of BackupPC doesn't object to the name... it's the most obvious way to make it clear that this tool works with BackupPC.) -- Carl D Cravens (ccrav...@excelii.com), Ext 228 (620.327.1228) Lead System Architect ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current with LearnDevNow - 3,200 step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. ON SALE this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnnow-d2d _______________________________________________ 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/