Simple
Integrated
Multiplatform
Backup &
Archive

or

Simply
Accessible
Backup & 
Archive


Performance:

workstation 2.4 Ghz P4, 512 MB RAM, SATA disk 
over 100 Mbps Ethernet
to server 2.4 Ghz P4, 2 GB RAM, IDE/SCSI disk array

~800000 files / 992387 links (lots of hard links)
~20 GB / 28330052 kB (multiple storage of hard links)

time: 4h33m 

~ 60 files / sec.
~ 1700 kB / sec

cpu usage was negligible. 
bandwidth limited by network for large files.
top files/sec was much higher than average (> 300).

conclusion: bottleneck were seek times for DA.
(hardly optimizable except maybe by sorting inode numbers)


Same the next day: 3171 files transferred. 1h20min.

~200 files / sec.



check filenames with non-ascii characters.
    Seems to work, except if there are non-utf-8 filenames on a utf fs
    (but that can't really work).

check gid bits.


Equality checking doesn't work if user is unknown on backup server:

-r--r--r--  1 4294967294 users 1449 2004-12-01 15:44 2006-11-27T23.22.42/yoyo.hjp.at/home/camel/wrk/perl-5.8.8/util.h
-r--r--r--  1 4294967294 users 1449 2004-12-01 15:44 2006-11-28T10.18.30/yoyo.hjp.at/home/camel/wrk/perl-5.8.8/util.h

should be one file with two links, not two files.


Tape performance:

    DDS4 (Vendor: HP       Model: C5683A):
	About 5-6 MB/s for /dev/nst0, @ 64 kB Blocksize. (larger bs makes no
	difference). File was about 26 MB, 75% compressible with gzip.

exit if disk full

On my 800 MHz PIII, the CPU usage is rather high. Some profiling seems
to be necessary (or I should get a faster backup server :-)).


mkdir_p doesn't report the real reason of a failure:

mkdir_p('/backup/2008-06-20T08.10.56/zeno.hjp.at/.', 777)
mkdir_p('/backup/2008-06-20T08.10.56/zeno.hjp.at', 777)
mkdir_p('/backup/2008-06-20T08.10.56', 777)
        failed: Read-only file system
cannot mkdir /backup/2008-06-20T08.10.56/zeno.hjp.at/.: No such file or directory at /usr/local/share/perl/5.8.8/Simba/CA.pm line 180, <GEN1> line 1.

The real reason is "Read-only file system" but after mkdir_p returns,
$! is "No such file or directory". (and anyway Simba::CA::backup2disk
shouldn't just die, but write a message to the log file first, but
that's a different problem)

Ideas: 

 * Check if File::Path behaves better.
 * Die on error and let caller catch the error.