On Mar 15, 2015, at 3:21 PM, Holger Parplies <wbppc AT parplies DOT de> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Philip Prindeville wrote on 2015-03-10 16:49:30 -0600 [[BackupPC-users] 
> Config example for backing up linux host, local disk drive]:
>> [...]
>> I have a Linux desktop box with a WD USB 3.0 external drive which I want to
>> use for backups.
> 
> this is all you give us, and you expect meaningful answers in form of
> configuration examples?


I could give pages and pages of information, a lot of which might be 
irrelevant, and end up turning my posting into a TL;DR.  I figured a reasonable 
person would respond asking for the information they needed.


> 
>> [...]
>> I have the drive locally attached and mounted as /mnt/mybook and the
>> filesystem has the top-level directory ?backups? in it.
> 
> A short selection of questions this raises:
> 
> - Is the drive attached permanently (pre-boot to post-shutdown) or only
>  occasionally for backup or other purposes? The mere fact that you *mention*
>  that it is external already suggests the connection is not permanent.
> - Do you plan to store other data alongside the backups in the same partition?
>  Don't.
> - What filesystem type?
> - What is the purpose of your backups? Saving user data, creating a history of
>  user data changes, system bare metal restore, ...?
> - Are you at all considering automatically scheduled backups, or would a
>  backup always be initiated manually?


The drive is a WD 3 TB USB 3.0 drive formatted as ext4 in a single partition 
(sdc1) and it is mounted (via /etc/fstab) at boot time.  It isn’t intended for 
any other purpose but backups.

I’d like to do regular backups, with the capability of either a bare metal 
restore of a machine (assuming a boot from a recovery ISO image or else an 
alternate /boot partition on the host), as well as backing up some high churn 
server state (like /var/svn on an SCM server, or /home for various CI 
[continuous integration] users I’ve set up).

I’d like to do full backups at least twice a week, and hourly incrementals.


> 
> The short answer to the question at hand is that BackupPC is probably not the
> right tool, though it can doubtlessly be made to do what you want, presuming
> you can specify what you want it to do. The fact that you write
> 
>> Should be trivial, right?
> 
> as well as the very idea of doing localhost only backups to an external drive
> suggests you might not have read more about BackupPC than its name. Your use
> case seems to be *very different* from what BackupPC aims at: automated
> scheduling of backups in a multi-client environment (with "client" referring
> to a target to backup, which makes as much sense for traditional server hosts
> as for, say, notebooks or Windoze computers with decentralized user data). You
> *can* use it with single hosts, but with a removable pool medium you're asking
> for a lot of hassle to undo the advantages BackupPC is supposed to give you.

It’s not a removable pool.  The client being the same machine as the server is 
just a degenerate case, right?

Are you suggesting I use amanda, or a cron/dump script instead?


> 
> Are you looking for something like Apple's Time Machine?


My understanding was that Time Machine was more oriented towards user data 
backups, and not a server scenario with a large amount of data which churns 
frequently.

-Philip

> 
> Regards,
> Holger


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