Saturday, August 22, 2009
Are you still using PBA?
I haven't updated PBA in years, but I'm curious how many people are still using it. Make a comment if you still use PBA. I know it's not the best way to track usage, but it'll at least give me a approximate sense of the user base. I'll probably look into download statistics from sourceforge as well, but that only tells me how many people downloaded PBA and doesn't get into how many people actually use it.
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8 comments:
No offense but I find the lack of documentation to be a real hindrance. I'm using this with Amahi. PBA was one of the main reasons I wanted to get an Amahi server going. The way they describe it, there's no more need for Ghost or True Image. "not updated in years" is a gross understatement. I get the impression this is a bare bones no frills system by design. However Amahi really makes a big deal about it. I find the necessity of having to *manually* reboot the system to the network, in effect shutting down any system I need to back up, to be a reason not to even try PBA. But I tried it, and I can't get a DHCP lease or even an indication there's a PXE server even running on the Amahi box. There's nothing in any wiki I can find that tells me what daemon to check for, or commands to start it manually. Seriously though, this is too crude to deploy on a network. Not when True Image can do this from a running OS under automation, do full (bare metal restore images) or incremental backups. I had my hopes up, but this just isn't worth trying to get running for me. I don't bck up as a hobby, I don't even want to think about backing up. It should just happen. Sorry but projects like PBA don't really serve to advance Linux much in my opinion. If PBA can be morphed into something like the COnnected Backup server (except actually work!) that would be an improvement. I'd pay for it if it worked.
You bring up excellent, valid points. It's unfortunate that there's little documentation and PBA hasn't been updated in awhile. That likely won't change soon. For projects like Amahi, I've already suggested to the Amahi team leader to look at other projects that are better maintained (such as Clonezilla) as longer term solutions for backup. Because Amahi is an open source project, there are opportunities for others to integrate other back up solutions or improve upon what's already there. I don't disagree with you that Acronis makes a good commercial product. Thanks for taking the time to comment.
Yes, I still use it - great idea for an appliance
yeppers
I definitely use it. I look after a relatively small fleet of desktops and find it invaluable. I have to run around looking for new client distributions every time I get new hardware and find the HDD or NIC configuration is no longer supported, but other than that I really couldn't do without it. It's simple, it does the job and it costs nothing... what more could you ask !
I'm using PBA currently. With the new problems with new hardware, I made a ubuntu 8.04 distro modification adding the pba script and getting good results with it (I added support for sshfs for a local/net backup without pba server too). If you wants my version of the distro I feel lucky to contribute with your project.
Thanks for your good job, many of my job mates use now your tool
I have used pba a few times, I like it. We would have rolled it out at work as well, but unfortunately there are network and serial controller that are not supported. Looking forward to the new version.
I only discovered this today and I'm very impressed. My only gripe is that it does not seem possible to shrink the VM as the "vmware-toolbox" command yields errors - but in no way do I really understand Linux (so it's probably me).
Great tool though. Thanks.
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