Amir Pakdel

Official Site

  • Full Screen
  • Wide Screen
  • Narrow Screen
  • Increase font size
  • Default font size
  • Decrease font size

Backup Solutions

I am going to test some OpenSource-Free backup solutions in order to select the one that would be used in my company in order to backup workstations of IT department. In this section I am going to write a brief review about each one and also I am going to include some Getting Started style tips and tricks.

 

BackupPC

Tuesday, 22 June 2010 14:42 Amir Pakdel
E-mail Print PDF

BackupPC Logo

high-performance, enterprise-grade system for backing up PCs

Testbed Distribution: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (lucid)
Version: 3.1.0-9ubuntu1
Description:BackupPC is disk based and not tape based. This particularity allows features not found in any other backup solution:

  • Clever pooling scheme minimizes disk storage and disk I/O. Identical files across multiple backups of the same or different PC are stored only once resulting in substantial savings in disk storage and disk writes. Also known as “data deduplication”.
  • Optional compression provides additional reductions in storage. CPU impact of compression is low since only new files (those not already in the pool) need to be compressed.
  • A powerful 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 very quickly.
  • No client-side software is needed. On WinXX the smb protocol is used. On Linux or Unix clients, rsync or tar (over ssh/rsh/nfs) can be used
  • Flexible restore options. Single files can be downloaded from any backup directly from the CGI interface. Zip or Tar archives for selected files or directories can also be downloaded from the CGI interface.
  • BackupPC 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.
  • and more to discover in the manual...

Server Status page of BackupPC Config Edit page of BackupPC Config Edit page of BackupPC Config Edit page of BackupPC Host ws1524o-pak Backup Summary page of BackupPC Browse backup page of BackupPC

Installation via APT was really fast and easy (using either of apt-get or synaptic). Even a user with a strong password was created to be used with the WUI (Web User Interface).

Adding a host to be backed up does not seem easy and I had to read the documentation:

  • Add a host in Edit Hosts
  • Select the host from the drop-down
  • Set parameters in Edit Config of the newly added host
  • For example I wanted to only backup a directory named Archive on a share named Public so I set SmbShareName to Public and in BackupFilesOnly added a key named Public and added Archive as a value to it.
  • In HOSTNAME Home there is a Start Full Backup
Removing unwanted backups is even more difficult:
  • Remove the directory named as the backup number
  • Run the BackupPC_nightly script to cleanup the pool
There is a script to do this (removal of backups) in the following URL:
Last but not least, Browse backups feature works great.

Since I do not want to manage backups centrally, it is not a good solution for my case. I just want to give everyone a kind of access to some sort of storage and give them an application and perhaps some configuration information so they can backup their data themselves however they want to.

Here are some tips that might come in handy:

  • Some of default values in my distribution:
    Data Directory referred to as __TOPDIR__ is /var/lib/backuppc
    Config Directory referred to as __CONFDIR__ is /etc/backuppc
    Config of each HOST is a file named HOST.pl in /etc/backuppc/pc which is linked to /etc/backuppc
Last Updated on Tuesday, 29 June 2010 11:28
You are here: