BackupPC

Random tips for BackupPC:

1. On your client systems (those that will be backed up by BackupPC), rotate your logs (whether compressed or not) with dates in the filenames, instead of appending prefixes such as .1, .2, .3, etc. The benefit from this is that BackupPC will ignore old logs on new runs, since they will have the same name and the same checksum. If you rotate logs with numbered names, BackupPC will transfer them again, since the name will have changed. This configuration is achieved with the dateext parameter set in logrotate configuration file, which on CentOS 6 is at /etc/logrotate.conf, by default.

2. If mlocate is installed on the BackupPC system, you should exclude the backup directory from being indexed by the nightly run of updatedb, otherwise /var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db will become enormous. To exclude the backup directory, edit /etc/updatedb.conf and append the directory path to the end of the line for the PRUNEPATHS variable.

See Also

• BackupPC Archive is a Perl script that maintains archive copies of backups taken with BackupPC. Fork on GitHub.
• A BackupPC Windows Client used to live at michaelstowe.com/backuppc/ but that project seems dead (last checked 2020-12-23)
• Stale NFS Mount Causes BackupPC fileListReceive() Failure