BackupPC Notes

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BackupPC Docs

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.

Adding a client for rsync

  1. Install cygwin w/ rsync on the client with the following packages
    1. admin - cygrunsrv
    2. net - rsync
    3. net - openssl
    4. utils - bzip2

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
    • /mnt
    • /media Ubuntu mounts for removable media
    • 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??