On Sun, Sep 19, 2010 at 12:58 AM, Dennis Blewett
<dennis.blewett AT gmail DOT com> wrote:
> Yeah, the rsync mirror option sounds pretty good. I think I'll look into
> that.
>
> At the moment, I'm using my laptop as a mobile workstation. As such, I'm
> attempting to find a way to hookup the laptop to the server and generate a
> backup while I'm asleep.
>
> What would be some of the next steps I take?
>
> My guess is that I do the following:
>
> 1. setup a passwordless ssh connection

The BackupPC howto shows you how to do this manually but an easier
approach is to use 'ssh-copy-id'. Start with the backuppc ssh howto[1]
and when you get to "Key exchange" do this instead from the backuppc
user on the server:

ssh-copy-id user@remotemachine

NOTE!!!
1. You may not be able to login as the backuppc user if like with
Fedora it does not get a shell assigned by default. To get around
this, from root:
# su -l -s /bin/bash backuppc
2. Sometimes it copies the key into ~/authorized_keys and not
~/authorized_keys2 <-- Note the 2 on the end. Just rename the file if
this happens.

This will make sure you're copying the public key from the backuppc
user and not another user. Make sure you know where backuppc's home
directory is. Under Fedora it is '/var/lib/BackupPC'. Your's may be
different. This is where the .ssh folder should be generated.

> 2. configure backuppc

I can only help you with Fedora here, but if you use your package
manager it should be mostly painless. Remember to setup a login
password in apache and setup the admin user (same username for both)
in /etc/backuppc/config.pl (or whatever your backuppc config file is
called).

> 3. have scripts on the laptop to make sure it connects to the server and
> initiates a backup to the server

I don't think you can initiate a backup directly from the client but I
may be wrong. You'll want to setup your apache server to allow logins
from your laptop and you can just initiate one that way.

> In relation to step 2, should I be using rsync if I am transmitting
> information from the laptop to the server? Furthermore, I have the server
> and laptop setup with different users and the permissions and who owns what
> on the files is varied. If the user ownership varies yet the file is the
> same, will backuppc attempt to backup the entire file, or will it simply
> find a way to tag on the ownership differences without backing up the entire
> file again?

If I understand you correctly... BackupPC will own the actual files
once backed up so it can "pool" them together which is how it's saves
space. I'm not sure how it keeps track of who owns what files.

Richard

[1] http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/faq/ssh.html#how_do_i_setup_openssh

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