BackupPC Notes

BackupPC Docs

• BackupPC manual
• BackupPC wiki

Web Interface

The webpage that hold status messages for BackupPC is http://192.168.40.196/backuppc/ The address will change as the system goes live.

Config Files

Most of the configuration for BackupPC is in /etc/backuppc/config.pl Many of the options can be over-ridden with host-specific files, but the config.pl should be edited to give a good default for Windows machines. Most importantly $Conf{BackupFilesExclude} or $Conf{RsyncArgs} need to be configured to exclude the followng items:

• Windows clients
  • hiberfil.sys holds RAM contents during hibernation
  • Temporary Internet Files IE cache
  • Firefox Internet Cache
  • RECYCLER Recyle Bin
  • pagefile.sys Swap file
  • System Volume Information System Restore files
  • NTUSER.DAT Can cause problems with being in use??
  • TEMP
• Linux clients
  • /temp
  • /dev
  • /proc
  • /sys
  • Firefox internet cache
  • Other caches??
  • Parts of /var??

Backup Method

Unless testing shows otherwise, the preferred method is rsync-over-ssh. This requires a minimal ssh and rsync install on the clients (probably a stripped-down cygwin). It has the advantage of being compressible and fully encrypted over the wire, and only transferring the changed parts of files. The downside is a higher CPU load on the server and clients for encryption and compression. For Linux hosts we should use a backuppc user and sudo privileges to avoid possible root-level compromises.

Storage Setup on Vienna

Vienna has 8x500GB drives set up with an XFS filesystem on LVM over Linux md RAID6. The device is mounted to /data and has 2.8TB of usable space. The RAID6 configuration allows up to 2 drives to fail without loss of data, and the LVM allows the filesystem to be expanded as new drives are added in the future.

Things we need to think about

• ssh authentication method (authorized_keys, host-based authentication)
• Open files (Outlook)
• Thousands of small files can take very long to index (Pulse Recording can accumulate >60k)
• Finding dhcp hosts reliably
• checksum seeding
• Parity Archive
• Database dumps from MySQL on webserver
• User notification policy??