I'm assuming Ubuntu is close enough to stock Debian.  The main BackupPC log is 
in /var/lib/backuppc/log.  If you need to look at compressed logs, use 
BackupPC_zcat, as the developer didn't use standard gzip-compatible compression.

My startup section looks like this:

2014-09-03 14:00:48 Reading hosts file
2014-09-03 14:00:48 BackupPC started, pid 19467
2014-09-03 14:00:48 Running BackupPC_trashClean (pid=19485)
2014-09-03 14:00:48 Next wakeup is 2014-09-04 00:00:00

I expect if BackupPC is getting an error, you'll see it this log.

If it's failing silently, try starting it outside the init script so 
start-stop-daemon doesn't eat its output...

sudo -u backuppc /usr/share/backuppc/bin/BackupPC

...and see what output you get.

-- 
Carl D Cravens (ccravens AT excelii DOT com), Ext 228 (620.327.1228)
Lead System Architect

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