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| author | Lars Wirzenius <liw@liw.fi> | 2014-02-15 18:08:34 +0000 |
|---|---|---|
| committer | Lars Wirzenius <liw@liw.fi> | 2014-02-15 18:08:34 +0000 |
| commit | 390eeee71f82afc71e61648992a401910f47ee48 (patch) | |
| tree | 8939ab1b3d5cfa24d4f15364d542015820759645 /manual | |
| parent | 06f80f4b143b133807eed88e53a46425995f60a6 (diff) | |
| download | obnam-390eeee71f82afc71e61648992a401910f47ee48.tar.gz | |
Write repo sharing chapter
This is short. May need to be augmented later, or moved as a section
in some other chapter.
Diffstat (limited to 'manual')
| -rw-r--r-- | manual/100-many-clients.mdwn | 33 |
1 files changed, 30 insertions, 3 deletions
diff --git a/manual/100-many-clients.mdwn b/manual/100-many-clients.mdwn index dfcdca32..f952a0a0 100644 --- a/manual/100-many-clients.mdwn +++ b/manual/100-many-clients.mdwn @@ -1,7 +1,34 @@ Sharing a repository between multiple clients ============================================= -This chapter discusses what needs to be done to share a backup -repository between clients, and why that might be useful, and when not -to do that. +Obnam lets you backup several computers to the same repository. Each +client is identified by a name, which defaults to the system hostname: +the name you get when you run the `hostname` command. You can also set +the name explicitly, using the `--client-name` setting in Obnam. +All the clients sharing a repository share the file content data (the +chunks), and can de-duplicate across clients. Each client has its own +backup generations, and those are fully independent from other +clients. You can, for example, forget any generations you want for one +client, and it doesn't affect the generations or any backed up data +for any other client. + +Obnam takes care of locking automatically so you can run Obnam on each +client without having to arrange it so that you only run it on one +client at a time. + +A caveat of sharing a repository is that any client has access to all +chunks, and can delete any other client from the repository. This +means you should only share a repository amongst clients in the same +security domain: all clients should be trusted equally. If one client +gets hacked, then the intruder has access to all the data in the +repository, and can delete the backups of all the clients using that +repository. + +To share a repository amongst clients you need to do the following: + +* Set a unique name for each client. It needs to be unique within the + repository. +* Arrange for each client to have access to the repository. + +That's all. |