Cuba-Project.org

QBA was born out of a need for organisations to have a cost-effective backup solution. There are a number of commercial products out there, but they are often too expensive for small organizations to justify, and the existing free products are beyond the technical abilities of these organisations. QBA was inspired by other great appliances such as ESVA, the "Email scanning (security) Virtual Appliance" [0] and the Vyatta network appliance [1].

The plan is to have a free downloadable version of QBA, and to sell security and feature updates to subscribers via a custom repository hosted by Qustodium Internet Security. The freely downloadable QBA community version will not be entitled to that kind of support, but service upgrades will always be available and support could be provided through the forums.

QBA could be described as the GPL version of Apple’s "Time Machine" for Windows PCs:

• as a user, you do not have to configure anything,
• the data is backed up while you can keep on working (more on this below),
• and the restore interface is nice and clean, thanks to BackupPC!

QBA is the result of many great posts on the backuppc mailing list, and I would like to thank everyone for their contributions.

QBA is a simple, pre-built, easily configurable backup appliance that is intended to run on several virtualisation packages such as Qemu, VirtualBox, VMware, and others. QBA is intended to be plug&play for basic users but configurable for advanced users. This flexibility combined with the easy-to-use BackupPC web interface will empower users to automate their backups, without the need to know about the underlying operating system, which happens to be Ubuntu JeOS [2].