On 9/6/10 1:38 AM, Dennis Blewett wrote:
> Hello, all.
>
> I tried reading through the BackupPC manual, but I found it very cryptic. I
> can't tell if I should be using rsync or rsyncd.
> Furthermore, I can't determine if I should be using rsync in one scenario and
> rsyncd in another.

Normally if you have sshd running, you would use rsync and if you don't/can't 
have sshd you set up a standalone rsync in daemon mode on the target and use 
rsyncd in backuppc.  Earlier versions of Cygwin had a bug where rsync would 
hang 
randomly when run under sshd, so that was the main reason for running a 
standalone rsync daemon.  I believe that is fixed in the 1.7.x version so now 
you can do it either way on windows.

> I have a computer with three hard drives. I'm basically attempting a
> son-father-grandfather backup system.

The terms other systems use don't match backuppc very well - just think of 
fulls 
and incrementals with all storage pooled.

> Drive 1 = drive with Windows XP, Fedora, and Ubuntu
> Drive 2 = 500 GB drive (for archival purposes)
> Drive 3 = 1 TB drive (for archival purposes)
>
> In general, I want to do the following with this computer:
>
> 1. Backup materials on drive 1 to drive 2 and drive 3
> 2. Allow incremental backups of materials on drive 1 to be made to drive 2 and
> drive 3

Backuppc  has to put everything on one drive so hardlinks can work for pooling 
(or at least one filesystem - raid, lvm, etc. can combine drives into one 
filesystem.

> I believe in this scenario, I want something, such as rsync, to do the work,
> because rsync will only backup files that have changed or are new.

On a fast LAN this really doesn't matter that much, but rsync or rsyncd will do 
the best job of tracking changes.

> I have another computer (a laptop) with two OSs, bunches of partitions, etc...
> I want to be able to network the laptop to my computer (that of which I'm
> currently typing up this email) and have that information stored on drive 3.
> I'd like for it to be a incremental backup system, so I suspect it would be
> using rsync.
>
> As a side note, I won't mind if everything is only backed up to drive 3 if
> BackupPC is limited to backing up to only one drive.
>
> Again, I've read the manual. I don't understand it. I understand that BackupPC
> is a powerful backup tool.
> It seems to be better than the Simple Backup program I'm using in Ubuntu.

The big difference with backuppc is that all duplicate files are pooled, 
whether 
from different runs of the same machine or from different targets, and they are 
also compressed.  This can save quite a bit of space, particularly if you have 
several machines with the same files.

> What kinds of options, configurations, and actions must I make to get this 
> kind
> of backup setup going?

If you are going to use ubuntu as the server, the simple way to start is to 
mount a large filesystem as /var/lib/backuppc before installing the package. 
Then get the web interface working and add the targets.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell AT gmail DOT com


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