Introduction
BackupPC is a high-performance, enterprise-grade system for
backing up Linux, WinXX and MacOSX PCs and laptops to a server's disk. BackupPC
is highly configurable and easy to install and maintain.
In this guide, we will install
BackupPC on an Ubuntu 12.04 server
and use a NAS to store the backed up data.
In Ubuntu 12.04 Server,
the default install of BackupPC stores all the backups in the directory /var/lib/backuppc which is located on
the main hard disk drive /dev/sda. However, we wanted to store all the
backups on a NAS or to an another HDD.
Installing BackupPC
BackupPC is available in
Ubuntu's default repositories. So you can open a terminal and enter the
following commands:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install backuppc
During the installation, you may be asked for the following:
1.
mail
server configuration
2.
Using Apache2 with BackupPC
3.
Changing
the Password
BackupPC creates a system user
called "backuppc" to perform its tasks.
In addition, it configures an
Apache user called "backuppc", which was given briefly during
installation. We can change this password by typing the following commands:
sudo htpasswd /etc/backuppc/htpasswd backuppc
You will be asked to give and
confirm a new password.
Moving the BackupPC Destination
directory to NAS:
Step 1: Mount the NAS partition to the
BackupPC server. You can follow this
post to do this. For example, we can consider the NAS partition is mounted
as /data
Step 2: Copy the BackupPC data
directory contents to the NAS by using this command
sudo cp -r /var/lib/backuppc /data
Step 3: set the NAS directory owner to 'backuppc' by using this command
sudo chown -R backuppc:backuppc /data/backuppc
Step 4: Now check the new data directory is present and has the right
permissions with its contents
sudo ls -al /data
sudo ls -al /data/backuppc
Step 5: Remove the old BackupPC data directory:
sudo rm -r /var/lib/backuppc
Step 6: Set up a Symbolic Link from the Old Location to the New location
sudo ln -s /data/backuppc /var/lib/backuppc
Step 7: Set the owner of the symbolic link to 'backuppc':
sudo chown -h backuppc:backuppc /var/lib/backuppc
Step 8: Check the symbolic link is present and has the right
permissions with right contents:
sudo ls -al /var/lib
sudo ls -al /var/lib/backuppc
Step 9: Restart the server
sudo reboot
Step 10:
Point your web browser at http://IPADSRESS/backuppc. The BackupPC Server should
display the Status page. You are done.
Conclusion
BackupPC is a powerful tool to
automatically backup files from several servers to a central location. I am
using BackupPC in my production environment. The raw content is of 360 GB but
after deduplication and compression, it is of 45 GB only.
The compression and the
deduplication features make BackupPC one step ahead of other open-source Backup
tools.
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