Backup & Recovery: Inexpensive Backup Solutions for Open Systems

5.6. The BackupPC Community

How big is BackupPC's installed base? Given the nature of an open-source project, it is very hard to give exact figures, but here are some for an overview. From September 2001 until late February 2006, there were over 87,000 downloads of the core product from SourceForge. These downloads don't include installations via packages for standard Linux distributions such as Debian. In that time, there have been over four million visitors to the SourceForge project page. The project ranks in SourceForge's top 500 projects (out of over 110,000 projects). On Freshmeat, BackupPC has a user rating among the top 50 projects (out of over 40,000). Sites of all sizes are currently running BackupPC, from home users to small businesses, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), schools, universities, corporate departments, and large companies. Some of the largest BackupPC installations include a large school district with 1,500 clients and a division of a large company with 4,000 clients, each of which involve multiple servers with several terabytes of storage.

The BackupPC community is very responsive and helpful. There a few ways to join and become active in the BackupPC community, and there are many places to turn if you run into problems.

The BackupPC web site, at http://backuppc.sourceforce.net/, provides many helpful tools for the community. The documentation covers the configuration in depth and is kept current with any changes in the code. The SourceForge site also has a FAQ.

If the answers cannot be found there, searching or posting to the mailing list normally solves any issue. The main mailing list is BackupPC@lists.sourceforge.net. The main developers are very active on the list, and they take time to help out new folks. The list itself is not high volume, but the quality of the discussion is very useful. The list is very forgiving of new users and works hard to help them out.

The developers respond fairly promptly, and, if the issue is a bug, work with the bug reporter to get the issue solved. When posting to the mailing list, try to include as much information as possible, such as the OS of the server and the client, a copy of the config files, and the error sections from the logs.