BackupPC
BackupPC is a high-performance, enterprise-grade backup system for backing up Linux, Win32, and laptops to a server's disk. Features include clever pooling of identical files, no client-side software, and a powerful Apache/CGI user interface.
| Tags | Archiving backup Recovery Tools Systems Administration |
|---|---|
| Licenses | GPL |
| Operating Systems | POSIX BSD HP-UX Linux Other Solaris Unix |
| Implementation | Perl |
Recent releases
- 05 Dec 2007 23:10
Changes: Various new features were added including a sorting by column feature for hosting the summary table in the CGI interface, performance improvements, Simplified Chinese and Polish CGI translations, run time checks that the data store supports hardlinks, and links to the new Wiki.
- 18 Mar 2007 12:42
Changes: Several major features have been added since 2.1.3, including a configuration and host CGI editor, rsync hardlink support, multi-level incrementals, RSS support, full UTF-8 support, and decoupling of BackupPC_dump from BackupPC_nightly.
- 27 Feb 2007 10:55
No changes have been submitted for this release.
- 10 Sep 2005 01:33
Changes: This release fixes several bugs and includes some language translation improvements.
- 20 Mar 2005 02:40
Changes: This release fixes several problems.
- All comments
Recent commentsI use backuppc for our servers and some workstations and while it can appear hard its actually very easy to setup and forget. After some light tweaking things run themselves and neednt much attention at all. Best of all is that restoring backups and individual files to computers or other media is dead simple and easy.
Saves a ton in space on the backup server thanks to compression and pooling. I recommend it [Approved!]
backuppc is good stuff.
I've been quite impressed by backuppc. The web interface is very nice and convenient, but you can also do everything you need to via configuration files and command-line tools. For example, I wrote a script that automates adding a new backed-up server, including generating a SSH public key for it, adding that key to the client machine, and configuring the backup server.
The installation was amazingly easy. The software is only required on the server side, the clients only need rsync via ssh or rsyncd, Samba or similar configured so I didn't have to do any software configurations on them. I had my test system up in under an hour running backups and it was only a few hours to get a full production system up, including going through all the optimizations (IO::Dirent, RSS feeds, etc).
Re: Big security risk
Indeed, backuppc does *NOT* expect that it has remote root access to the system, as you can back up over NFS, Samba, or an rsync daemon. If you configure it to run via rsync over SSH, you do need to have root access to backup files that are not accessible by the backup user, but this access can be limited via SSH authorized_keys entries to only allowing reading files, or writing recovered files into a particular directory.
Re: Big security risk
Remote root access can be avoided. See:
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/faq/ssh.html
Craig
Excellent network backup
Backuppc is really excellent! After setup, it will happily back up all your computers and laptops to a central server. Big pluses are:
- incredibly efficient pooling of backup files. On my system, 2.7 TERABytes of backup data are compressed/pooled to around 400 GB.
- pooling allows you to back up all your machines completely, without caring much about excludes, since all those duplicated files get pooled and dont use any space!
- pooling also allows you to move/rename/duplicate huge directores without causing backup space to overflow
- configuration is very flexible and well documented, but a bit large because the program is so powerful
All in all: if you have more than a few machines to back up, have a good look at this!