New Zealand (South Island)
Seth Kenlon is a UNIX geek, free culture advocate, independent multimedia artist, and D&D nerd. He has worked in the film and computing industry, often at the same time. He is one of the maintainers of the Slackware-based multimedia production project Slackermedia.
Authored Comments
No kludge necessary, really. It absolutely an do this. My home network has two users across four machines (no where near 45 users, obviously); each machine spawns its own rdiff-backup process, and the usual amounts of data are not such that a bottleneck ever occurs. I don't think that a traffic jam is likely in the classroom, either, unless your students are creating massive amounts of data.What I would probably do, though, is just use git and teach the students to back up their OWN work! Git is easy to set up on a Pi or spare machine. Since 45 students is a lot of user accounts to manage, I have (again, in smaller settings; usually classes of no more than 10 students at a time), simply created one git repo per class, and then had each student create their own branch inside the class repository. Not exactly the intended design, but for simple student work, it tends to work ok. For advanced classes, I just have them SSH into the server and create their own git repository themselves. This is all done on a classroom-only server, within a private class LAN, obviously.
Never a bad idea to backup, and it's certainly better to put an old Pi to work than letting it sit and gather dust!