On 9/13/10 8:05 PM, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Les Mikesell wrote:
>
>>> I have a large (1TB) USB external drive
>>> I would like to use to backup my BackupPC data,
>>> in case drive sdb actually packs up.
>>>
>>> I've looked quickly at the BackupPC documentation,
>>> in particular the section on archiving,
>>> but I am not entirely clear of the procedure,
>>> and would be very grateful for precise instructions.
>
>> If you don't expect to need to restore from your old copies, the easiest
>> thing would be to just add a new internal drive mounted wherever the old
>> partition was and start over with new backups, keeping the old drive
>> around just in case until you have sufficient new history on the new
>> drive.  It may take a very long time to copy the old data and there's
>> some chance it would fail during the copy anyway.  If there is anything
>> particularly valuable in the old backups that doesn't still exist on the
>> source directories, you could do a browser download, saving to the
>> external drive.
>
> Thanks for your response.
> I'm not quite sure what you mean by "a browser download".

When you are using the web interface to browse the backups you have the option 
to select a directory or collection of files and download it as a tar archive. 
You can do that from the same or a different computer and download to that 
external drive.  There is a way to do that from the command line too, but it is 
easier to see what you are doing in the browser.

> Actually one of the directories I am backing up with BackupPC
> is on the same possibly bad disk.
> I guess it is better to back up the source first to another drive,
> as I think you are suggesting.

Either that or get a copy back as described above.  Or both.

> I have ordered a new internal disk, which should arrive in a couple of days,
> and I'll follow your suggestion.
> I currently have a partition mounted as /BackupPC .
> Can I just mount a partition on the new drive as /BackupPC instead?

You can if you don't ever expect to need the whole drive for backups. 
Backuppc's archive has to be on a single filesystem due to the way pooling 
works 
so it is usually best to give it as much space as you can.

> Doesn't BackupPC expect to find the old backups in place?

Depending on the layout your distribution had, you might need to make some of 
the subdirectories and copy over any config or perl files that might have been 
there, but if the directories under pc or cpool aren't there it should make new 
ones and start over.  I'd mount the old directory somewhere else so you have 
access to anything that might be missing and watch for error messages when you 
start.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell AT gmail DOT com



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