On 29/08/13 09:46, Murray Crane wrote: Personally (I'm not Andy) I'd say that its your bandwidth, that you've paid for so you can do what you want with it. If you're looking at rsync for backups, have you considered using rsnapshot? It uses rsync 'under the hood' but simplifies the rest of the setup and saves a bit of space. Cheers, Matt -- Matthew Moore Surgical Materials Testing Laboratory System Administrator Telephone: +44 (0)1656 752165 Email: matt(a)smtl.co.uk

Hi Murray, On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 09:46:30AM +0100, Murray Crane wrote: Sure. Where you may run into issues if if you're backing up a very large number of files (hundreds of thousands) and doing something like rsnapshot where you have a hardlink farm so the actual number of inodes is a multiple of this, then it can exhaust disk IO and cause a performance issue. However, you would feel the performance issue most acutely on your own VPS(es), so it is not a huge concern. No backups of user data are done by default. The free¹ backup service provided by BitFolk uses rsnapshot and is slightly flexible in terms of how many four-hourly / daily / weekly / monthly iterations you wish to keep. It is suitable for people who don't have other hosts to back up to, and who don't have very specific needs. If you or anyone else is interested in using it then please drop an email to support(a)bitfolk.com; here's the things you need to do/know first: https://bitfolk.com/customer_information.html#toc_2_Local_backups The main down side of it is that the data is unencrypted on BitFolk's servers², so anyone who gains access to the backup server could pretty trivially have a mooch through all your backed up data³. Minor down sides would be things like: - the lack of flexibility - the hassle caused when you back up something you didn't mean to back up. - the fact that if the suite in Telehouse was destroyed then probably your backups would die with your VPS's data Cheers, Andy ¹ "free" as in the service is free. The disk space used for backups still does need to be purchased. ² As an aside, if anyone was interested in encrypted backups then I would be willing to look into the feasibility of providing this. I haven't pushed it because my perception is that most people are either happy with dropbox-style services and trust the encryption guarantees offered there, or else they aren't and don't so roll their own with multiple cheap VPSes, Amazon S3, etc. I'd probably be looking at using something like the Least Authority File System: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs but am open to ideas. ³ Of course even if you ran an encrypted filesystem inside your VPS, someone who compromised one of the host servers could read the encryption keys out of your RAM, take a snapshot of your block device, and use both to decrypt the block device, but I wouldn't really call that trivial, just possible.