Erik van de Pol writes:
Hi Craig,
Thanks for the excellent backuppc. I'm installing it in my
house to backup our machines, and it works great. I think
I'm going to recommend this to the IS manager of our company.
Here's my question. I have a set up where I have all files
backed up to a separate hard drive that is mounted in a
tray. Every week or so I swap out the drive with one that I
have offsite. When I pop in the new drive, the backups on
that drive are old.
My reasoning is that I totally dislike creating backups (who
doesn't), and the biggest thing holding me back is jockying
CD-Rs to make a backup every so often. The hard drive based
backup happens automatically, and when I'm ready to swap the
drives, it is always up to date.
- Do I need to clean this out?
Not sure what you mean. Your approach would work.
- Is there any data stored by BackupPC in a different
location that could cause a problem (by being out of sync)?
I read somewhere that one of the plans is to have metadata
in mysql or flat text database. Not sure if that would break
my approach, so perhaps you can take my scenario that into
consideration also.
No, all the data is stored below the BackupPC data directory.
mysql might be used in future versions for configuration data,
and possibly backup data (in the backups file). We'll consider
your usage model when we add mysql support.
- Do I have to remove any old backups on the drive (or does
that happen automatically -- not sure how you determine the
"age" of a backup)?
This happens automatically. See $Conf{FullKeepCnt} and
$Conf{IncrKeepCnt}, plus several other settings.
- Will BackupPC detect that the latest full backup is too
old, and therefore it has to do a fresh one (even if the
last full was done yeterday)?
Yes. After you swap the drives, the most recent backup will be
appear to be a week old. So it will start with a full backup,
and then continue with daily incremental backups.
- When doing incrementals, is that based on the backups
already present on the drive?
Yes. Incrementals are based on the last full backup.
I have config scripts sitting in /etc/backuppc/ while the
backup drive is mounted under /mnt/backuppc. Config files
are symlinked from that drive location to etc.
And the hosts file should be symlinked too, so you only
have to maintain one copy of it. I would also mirror
the config and host files from /etc back onto the removable
disk so you have a copy of those files offsite.
Any help that you could offer is greatly appreciated.
Sounds like your setup would work fine.
Other requests:
- Is there a way to prevent any backups from being scheduled
from the GUI ("maintenance mode")? That would fit in my
scenario. I could tell BackupPC that I want to swap a drive
set for instance between 7pm and 9pm on a certain date, and
BPC would make sure nothing is running in that window. I
could then umount the drive, swap it out, mount (and
possibly init) the fresh drive, and off we go again.
You can't explicitly stop backups during a period. But you can control
when backups are started. That's done with $Conf{WakeupSchedule} and
$Conf{BlackoutPeriods}.
- Is it possible (I'm not too familiar with rsync protocol)
to give an estimated completion time for every backup? It
seems like most info is already available in the file list
that is requested. This could then be presented in the GUI
in a simple way.
There is no progress status, but as you note rsync knows how
far along the file list it is. That's still approximate
(since there could be very large files at the start or end
of the file list), but at least it gives an idea.
- Our laptops are always pingable through wifi, however
often they are docked/wired (with 100TX). It would be great
if that could be used too: if BackupPC could have a primary
and fallback IP address, then it could try the primary first
(say, a fast 100tx), and if that fails do the fallback
connection (wifi). This would prevent the (horribly slow)
wifi backups from timing out and not running to completion.
Hey, Wifi is my day job and if you use 11g or 11a with rsync
it really does go fast.
This could work in several ways. I assume the laptops have
two network interfaces and two IP addresses? Does nmblookup
return the right ip address? If so, it might work correctly
without any changes.
If the addresses are assigned via dhcp (likely) and nmblookup
doesn't return the right ip address then you could point
$Conf{NmbLookupFindHostCmd} to a script that returns the right
IP address given the host name (instead of nmblookup), using
whatever logic you please.
- Is it possible to define email addresses for all users?
Yes. The user names associated with each host go in the host file,
and that's the address used for email.
Craig
-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials
Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of
GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system
administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click
_______________________________________________
BackupPC-users mailing list
BackupPC-users < at > lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
