Having complete and reliable backups is a necessity when working with computers. No matter what operating system you use, you are still just as susceptible to hardware failure as any fool using a computer. Luckily the big boys in the operating system industries have been thinking of the user’s and their data and have begun including some pretty good backup utilities with their software.

For the regular Joe sitting at home these are great options and are pretty good about making it easy. However if you have multiple computers/servers that vary in flavors like Windows XP, Vista, 7, Linux, and OS X. It can become a real pain in the neck to manage all these backups. Each of them has their own utility with different behavior. It would be so much easier if you just had one backup utility that could touch all your bases in one easy to manage and control interface. Well, there is hope! That’s why today I’ll be showing you how to install Backuppc.

BackupPC is a high-performance, enterprise-grade system for backing up Unix, Linux, WinXX, and MacOSX PCs, desktops and laptops to a server’s disk. It even has a few different methods to communicate with each of these operating systems. You can run backup’s via Samba, Rsync/SSH, and tar.  And better yet, you don’t even have to have a client installed and running in the background on any of the client machines being backed up.  With the exception of Windows, but only if you are backing up Windows via Rsync.

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For a more complete reference when it comes to how you can tweak and tune your backups, check out the Backuppc wiki.  It is filled with a ton of great information.  But for those of you who are already decided on using Backuppc, lets get down to starting.

Of course there are things to consider when building a backup server.  Storage being the key topic here, You’ll need a good amount of storage!  Luckily Backuppc uses some intelligence when it comes to doing these backups.

Full Backup
A full backup is a complete backup of a share. BackupPC can be configured to do a full backup at a regular interval (typically weekly). BackupPC can be configured to keep a certain number of full backups. Exponential expiry is also supported, allowing full backups with various vintages to be kept (for example, a settable number of most recent weekly fulls, plus a settable number of older fulls that are 2, 4, 8, or 16 weeks apart).

Incremental Backup
An incremental backup is a backup of files that have changed since the last successful full or incremental backup. Starting in BackupPC 3.0 multi-level incrementals are supported. A full backup has level 0. A new incremental of level N will backup all files that have changed since the most recent backup of a lower level. $Conf{IncrLevels} is used to specify the level of each successive incremental. The default value is all level 1, which makes the behavior the same as earlier versions of BackupPC: each incremental will back up all the files that changed since the last full (level 0).

For SMB and tar, BackupPC uses the modification time (mtime) to determine which files have changed since the last lower-level backup. That means SMB and tar incrementals are not able to detect deleted files, renamed files or new files whose modification time is prior to the last lower-level backup.

Rsync is more clever: any files whose attributes have changed (ie: uid, gid, mtime, modes, size) since the last full are backed up. Deleted, new files and renamed files are detected by Rsync incrementals.

BackupPC can also be configured to keep a certain number of incremental backups, and to keep a smaller number of very old incremental backups. If multi-level incrementals are specified then it is likely that more incrementals will need to be kept since lower-level incrementals (and the full backup) are needed to reconstruct a higher-level incremental.

BackupPC “fills-in” incremental backups when browsing or restoring, based on the levels of each backup, giving every backup a “full” appearance. This makes browsing and restoring backups much easier: you can restore from any one backup independent of whether it was an incremental or full.

Partial Backup
When a full backup fails or is canceled, and some files have already been backed up, BackupPC keeps a partial backup containing just the files that were backed up successfully. The partial backup is removed when the next successful backup completes, or if another full backup fails resulting in a newer partial backup. A failed full backup that has not backed up any files, or any failed incremental backup, is removed; no partial backup is saved in these cases.

The partial backup may be browsed or used to restore files just like a successful full or incremental backup.

With the rsync transfer method the partial backup is used to resume the next full backup, avoiding the need to retransfer the file data already in the partial backup.

Identical Files
BackupPC pools identical files using hardlinks. By “identical files” we mean files with identical contents, not necessary the same permissions, ownership or modification time. Two files might have different permissions, ownership, or modification time but will still be pooled whenever the contents are identical. This is possible since BackupPC stores the file meta-data (permissions, ownership, and modification time) separately from the file contents.

Backup Policy
Based on your site’s requirements you need to decide what your backup policy is. BackupPC is not designed to provide exact re-imaging of failed disks. See Limitations for more information. However, the addition of tar transport for linux/unix clients, plus full support for special file types and unix attributes in v1.4.0 likely means an exact image of a linux/unix file system can be made.

BackupPC saves backups onto disk. Because of pooling you can relatively economically keep several weeks of old backups.

At some sites the disk-based backup will be adequate, without a secondary tape backup. This system is robust to any single failure: if a client disk fails or loses files, the BackupPC server can be used to restore files. If the server disk fails, BackupPC can be restarted on a fresh file system, and create new backups from the clients. The chance of the server disk failing can be made very small by spending more money on increasingly better RAID systems. However, there is still the risk of catastrophic events like fires or earthquakes that can destroy both the BackupPC server and the clients it is backing up if they are physically nearby.

Some sites might choose to do periodic backups to tape or cd/dvd. This backup can be done perhaps weekly using the archive function of BackupPC.

Other users have reported success with removable disks to rotate the BackupPC data drives, or using rsync to mirror the BackupPC data pool offsite.

So now that we can see a little bit on how Backuppc works, it would be wise to check out the Requirements @ within the Backuppc Wiki.

On page two we’ll get started with the install.

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