BackupPC

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Maintainer

Daniel B.
Firewall Services
mailto:daniel@firewall-services.com

Description

BackupPC is a powerful, high-performance, enterprise-grade system for backing up a large number of Linux and Windows PCs and laptops to a server's disk. BackupPC is highly configurable and easy to install and maintain.

With the decreasing cost of disks and raid systems, it is practical and cost effective to backup a large number of machines onto a server's local disk or network storage. This is what BackupPC does. For some sites, this might be the complete backup solution. For other sites, additional permanent archives could be created by periodically backing up the server to tape. A variety of Open Source systems are available for doing backup to tape.

BackupPC is written in Perl and extracts backup data via SMB using Samba, tar over ssh/rsh/nfs, or rsync. It is robust, reliable, well documented and freely available as Open Source on SourceForge.

More information & support is available at http://backuppc.sourceforge.net

Features

A clever pooling scheme minimizes disk storage and disk I/O. Identical files across multiple backups of the same or different PCs are stored only once resulting in substantial savings in disk storage and disk I/O.

One example of disk use: 95 latops with each full backup averaging 3.6GB each, and each incremental averaging about 0.3GB. Storing three weekly full backups and six incremental backups per laptop is around 1200GB of raw data, but because of pooling and compression only 150GB is needed.

Optional compression support further reducing disk storage. Since only new files (not already pooled) need to be compressed, there is only a modest impact on CPU time.

No client-side software is needed. The standard smb protocol is used to extract backup data on WinXX clients. On linux clients, tar over ssh/rsh/nfs is used to backup the data. With version 2.0.0, rsync is also supported on any client that has rsync or rysncd.

A powerful web (http/cgi) user interface allows administrators to view log files, configuration, current status and allows users to initiate and cancel backups and browse and restore files from backups.

A full set of restore options is supported, including direct restore (via smbclient, tar, or rsync/rsyncd) or downloading a zip or tar file.

Supports mobile environments where laptops are only intermittently connected to the network and have dynamic IP addresses (DHCP).

Flexible configuration parameters allow multiple backups to be performed in parallel, specification of which shares to backup, which directories to backup or not backup, various schedules for full and incremental backups, schedules for email reminders to users and so on. Configuration parameters can be set system-wide or also on a per-PC basis.

Users are sent periodic email reminders if their PC has not recently been backed up. Email content, timing and policies are configurable.

Tested on Linux, Freenix and Solaris hosts, and Linux, Win95, Win98, Win2000 and WinXP clients.

Detailed documentation.

Open Source hosted by SourceForge and freely availble under GPL.

Requirements

• SME Server 7.X
• a dedicated volume is recomanded (can be a simple disk or a RAID array)

Installation

• Mount a volume on /var/lib/BackupPC

This part is optionnal but highly recommanded. Backups should allways be on a separate volume. First, prepare your hard drive for ext3 fs (you can use any fs which support hardlinks, I allways use ext3 as it's verry reliable) In this example, I use a simple partition /dev/sdb1, it could also be a RAID array (/dev/md3) or a LVM logical volume (or a combination of RAID and lvm). By the way, if you know how to manage LVM, its usage is also recommanded as it'll be easier to manage backups data later.

mkfs.ext3 -L BACKUPPC -m 1 /dev/sdb1

Now, we need to create the directory

mkdir -p /var/lib/BackupPC

Add the mount point in fstab. Just add something like:

/dev/sdb1    /var/lib/BackupPC       ext3    noatime 0 0

And check everything is ok

mount -a
mount | grep BackupPC
/dev/sdb1 on /var/lib/BackupPC type ext3 (rw,noatime)

• create some symlinks

This part is optionnal but recommanded. With these commands, all BackupPC related files (config and logs) will be stored on the BackupPC volume. You'll then be able to swap the BackupPC disk between two servers.

mkdir -p /var/lib/BackupPC{etc,log}
ln -s /var/lib/BackupPC/etc /etc/BackupPC
ln -s /var/lib/BackupPC/log /var/log/BackupPC

• install the rpms

yum --enablerepo=smecontribs install smeserver-BackupPC
signal-event backuppc-update

You should now be able to access the interface in the server-manager or directly on https://my.domain.tld/BackupPC

You'll find three sample configuration:

• smeserver-template is a sample config file to backup a SME Server.
• localhost-template is a sample to backup the server itself
• windows-tempalte is a sample to backup a windows host using cygwin+rsyncd

To create a host using a template, create a new host, add =<template_name>

For example

myserver=smeserver-template

When you submit, the configuration from smeserver-template will be copied on my_server. You then can edit my_server's config

Upgrade from smeserver-backuppc.fws-3.0-1

If you allready use the previous version of the contrib, some other steps are needed are the default location of the backups has changed from /opt/backuppc/files to /var/lib/BackupPC

The easiest way is just to symlink the old location to the new one:

ln -s /opt/backuppc/files /var/lib/BackupPC

Then, you can install the new release:

yum --enablerepo=smecontribs install smeserver-BackupPC

Then, just enter the following commands:

mv /etc/BackupPC/config.pl.back /etc/BackupPC/config.pl
mv /etc/BackupPC/hosts.back /etc/BackupPC/hosts
mv /etc/BackupPC/pc/localhost.pl.back /etc/BackupPC/pc/localhost.pl
db configuration delprop backuppc version
usermod -d /var/lib/BackupPC/ -m backuppc
mv /home/e-smith/files/users/backuppc/.ssh/ /var/lib/BackupPC/
signal-event backuppc-update

You should be done ;)

DB properties

there's only two properties you can change:

• status: (enabled|disabled) Do you want the service to start automatically when the server boot ?
• examples: (enabled|disabled) Do you want the sample configuration files to be added agin if they are removed ?

Uninstall

yum remove smeserver-BackupPC BackupPC

Source

The source for this contrib can be found in the smeserver CVS on sourceforge.

Bugs

Please raise bugs under the SME-Contribs section in bugzilla and select the smeserver-bridge-interface component or use this link

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