Hello,

We're currently syncing our local BackupPC pool to a remote server
using rsync -aH /var/lib/backuppc/ remote:/backup/backuppc/

This is executed inside a script which takes care of stopping BackupPC
while rsync is running as well as logging and e-mail notification. The
script nightly as a cronjob.

This works fairly well, except it won't remove old backups from the
remote server. Apart from using up unnecessary space, this has also
caused problems like hitting the remote filesystems hard link limit.

Now I'm aware of rsync's --delete option, but I find this very risky.
If for some reason the local backup server fails and
/var/lib/backuppc/ is somehow empty (disk fail etc), then --delete
would cause rsync to remove *all* of the mirrored files on the remote
server. This kind of ruins the whole point of having a remote
mirror...

So my question is then - how to make sure that the local backup pool
is sane and up-to-date without risking loosing the entire remote pool?

I have two ideas of which I'd love some input:

1. Perform some sanity check before running rsync to ensure that the
local backuppc directory is indeed healthy. How this sanity check
should be performed I'm unsure of. Maybe check for existence of some
file or examine the output of `BackupPC_serverMesg status info'?

2. Run another instance of BackupPC on the remote server, using the
same pc and hosts configuration as the local server but with
$Conf{BackupsDisable} = 2 in the global config. This instance should
then keep the remote pool clean (with BackupPC_trashClean and
BackupPC_nightly), or am I mistaken? Of course, this instance also has
to be stopped while rsyncing from the local server.

If someone could provide some more info on how this can be done
safely, it would be greatly appreciated!


Best regards,

Johannes H. Jensen

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