=item Full Backup
-A full backup is a complete backup of a share. BackupPC can be configured to
-do a full backup at a regular interval (often weekly). BackupPC can also
-be configured to keep a certain number of full backups, and to keep
-a smaller number of very old full backups.
+A full backup is a complete backup of a share. BackupPC can be
+configured to do a full backup at a regular interval (typically
+weekly). BackupPC can be configured to keep a certain number
+of full backups. Exponential expiry is also supported, allowing
+full backups with various vintages to be kept (for example, a
+settable number of most recent weekly fulls, plus a settable
+number of older fulls that are 2, 4, 8, or 16 weeks apart).
=item Incremental Backup
last full backup, giving every backup a "full" appearance. This makes
browsing and restoring backups easier.
+=item Partial Backup
+
+When a full backup fails or is canceled, and some files have already
+been backed up, BackupPC keeps a partial backup containing just the
+files that were backed up successfully. The partial backup is removed
+when the next successful backup completes, or if another full backup
+fails resulting in a newer partial backup. A failed full backup
+that has not backed up any files, or any failed incremental backup,
+is removed; no partial backup is saved in these cases.
+
+The partial backup may be browsed or used to restore files just like
+a successful full or incremental backup.
+
+With the rsync transfer method the partial backup is used to resume
+the next full backup, avoiding the need to retransfer the file data
+already in the partial backup.
+
=item Identical Files
BackupPC pools identical files using hardlinks. By "identical
developers (backuppc-devel), and a general user list for support, asking
questions or any other topic relevant to BackupPC (backuppc-users).
+The lists are archived on SourceForge and Gmane. The SourceForge lists
+are not always up to date and the searching is limited, so Gmane is
+a good alternative. See:
+
+ http://news.gmane.org/index.php?prefix=gmane.comp.sysutils.backup.backuppc
+ http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_id=503
+
You can subscribe to these lists by visiting:
http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-announce
=item *
-Adding hardlink support to rsync.
+Adding hardlink support to rsync. Currently the tar XferMethod
+correctly saves/restores hardlinks, but rsync does not. Rsync
+2.6.2 has greatly improved the efficiency of saving hardlink
+information, so File::RsyncP and BackupPC::Xfer::RsyncFileIO need
+the corresponding changes. Hardlink support is necessary for
+doing a bare-metal restore of a *nix system.
+
+=item *
+
+Adding more complete utf8 support. BackupPC should use utf8 as the
+native charset for storing file names, and the CGI script should emit
+utf8 so that the file names can be rendered correctly. Additional
+configuration parameters should allow you to specify the client Xfer
+charset (ie: the filcharset delivered by the XferMethod). BackupPC
+should encode/decode between this charset and utf8 when doing a
+backup/restore. That way BackupPC can store all files in utf8 no
+matter what charset is used by the XferMethod to deliver the file
+names. Secondly, the CGI charset should be configurable (default
+utf8) and the CGI script BackupPC_Admin should encode the utf8 file
+names in the desired output charset. Finally, the charset used to
+deliver file names when restoring individual file names should also
+be configurable, and again BackupPC_Admin should encode the file
+names in this charset (again, utf8 default). That should allow the
+"Save As" IE dialog to default to the correct file name.
=item *
=item *
+Because of file name mangling (adding "f" to start of each file
+name) and with pending utf8 changes, BackupPC is not able to
+store files whose file name length is 255 bytes or greater. The
+format of the attrib file should be extended so that very long
+file names (ie: >= 255) are abbreviated on the file system, but
+the full name is stored in the attrib file. This could also be
+used to eliminate the leading "f", since that is there to avoid
+collisions with the attrib file.
+
+=item *
+
Replacing smbclient with the perl module FileSys::SmbClient. This
gives much more direct control of the smb transfer, allowing
incrementals to depend on any attribute change (eg: exist, mtime,
Support --listed-incremental or --incremental for tar,
so that incrementals will depend upon any attribute change (eg: exist,
mtime, file size, uid, gid), rather than just mtime. This will allow
-tar to be to as capable as FileSys::SmbClient and rsync.
+tar to be to as capable as FileSys::SmbClient and rsync. This is
+low priority since rsync is really the preferred method.
+
+=item *
+
+In addition to allowing a specific backup (incremental or full) to
+be started from the CGI interface, also allow a "regular" backup
+to be started. This would behave just like a regular background
+backup and determine whether a full, incremental or nothing
+should be done.
=item *
For rysnc (and smb when FileSys::SmbClient is supported, and tar when
--listed-incremental is supported) support multi-level incrementals.
In fact, since incrementals will now be more "accurate", you could
-choose to never to full dumps (except the first time), or at a
+choose to never do full backups (except the first time), or at a
minimum do them infrequently: each incremental would depend upon
-the last, giving a continuous chain of differential dumps.
+the last, giving a continuous chain of differential backups.
+
+=item *
+
+Allow diffs between two different backed up files to be displayed.
+The history feature in 2.1.0 does show files that are the same
+between backups. Most often we would like to just take the diff of
+the same host, path and file between different backups, but it would
+be nice to generalize it to any pair of files (ie: different hosts,
+backups, paths etc). But I'm not sure how the user interface would
+look.
=item *
implementation effort. The program xdelta (v1) on SourceForge (see
L<http://sourceforge.net/projects/xdelta>) uses an rsync algorithm for
doing efficient binary file deltas. Rather than using an external
-program, File::RsyncP will eventually get the necessary delta
+program, File::RsyncP would eventually get the necessary delta
generation code from rsync.
=back
all of you!
Also, everyone is encouraged to contribute patches, bug reports, feature
-and design suggestions, code, and documentation corrections or
+and design suggestions, new code, and documentation corrections or
improvements.
=head1 Installing BackupPC
=item *
Perl version 5.6.0 or later. BackupPC has been tested with
-version 5.6.0, 5.6.1 and 5.8.0. If you don't have perl, please
-see L<http://www.cpan.org>.
+version 5.6.0, 5.6.1, 5.8.0, 5.8.1 and 5.8.2. If you don't
+have perl, please see L<http://www.cpan.org>.
=item *
Version 2.2.0 or later of Samba is required (smbclient's tar feature in
2.0.8 and prior has bugs for file path lengths around 100 characters
and generates bad output when file lengths change during the backup).
+Samba versions 3.x are stable and recommended instead of 2.x.
See L<http://www.samba.org> for source and binaries. It's pretty easy to
fetch and compile samba, and just grab smbclient and nmblookup, without
For BackupPC to use Rsync you will also need to install the perl
File::RsyncP module, which is available from
-L<http://perlrsync.sourceforge.net>. Version 0.44 or later is required.
+L<http://perlrsync.sourceforge.net>.
+Version 0.51 or later is required.
=item *
cd BackupPC-__VERSION__
perl configure.pl
-You will be prompted for the full paths of various executables, and
-you will be prompted for the following information:
+The configure.pl also accepts command-line options if you wish
+to run it in a non-interactive manner. It has self-contained
+documentation for all the command-line options, which you can
+read with perldoc:
+
+ perldoc configure.pl
+
+When you run configure.pl you will be prompted for the full paths
+of various executables, and you will be prompted for the following
+information:
=over 4
Note also that the $Conf{ClientNameAlias} feature does not work for
clients with DHCP set to 1.
-
+
=item User name
This should be the unix login/email name of the user who "owns" or uses
The relevant configuration settings are $Conf{RsyncClientPath},
$Conf{RsyncClientCmd}, $Conf{RsyncClientRestoreCmd}, $Conf{RsyncShareName},
-$Conf{RsyncArgs}, $Conf{RsyncRestoreArgs} and $Conf{RsyncLogLevel}.
+$Conf{RsyncArgs}, and $Conf{RsyncRestoreArgs}.
=item rsyncd
The relevant configuration settings are $Conf{RsyncdClientPort},
$Conf{RsyncdUserName}, $Conf{RsyncdPasswd}, $Conf{RsyncdAuthRequired},
-$Conf{RsyncShareName}, $Conf{RsyncArgs}, $Conf{RsyncRestoreArgs}
-and $Conf{RsyncLogLevel}. In the case of rsyncd, $Conf{RsyncShareName}
-is the name of an rsync module (ie: the thing in square brackets in
-rsyncd's conf file -- see rsyncd.conf), not a file system path.
+$Conf{RsyncShareName}, $Conf{RsyncArgs}, and $Conf{RsyncRestoreArgs}.
+$Conf{RsyncShareName} is the name of an rsync module (ie: the thing
+in square brackets in rsyncd's conf file -- see rsyncd.conf), not a
+file system path.
Be aware that rsyncd will remove the leading '/' from path names in
symbolic links if you specify "use chroot = no" in the rsynd.conf file.
set to 'archive'. This allows for multiple configurations at sites where
there might be a combination of tape and cd/dvd backups being made.
+BackupPC provides a menu that allows one or more hosts to be archived.
+The most recent backup of each host is archived using BackupPC_tarCreate,
+and the output is optionally compressed and split into fixed-sized
+files (eg: 650MB).
+
+The archive for each host is done by default using
+__INSTALLDIR__/BackupPC_archiveHost. This script can be copied
+and customized as needed.
+
=head2 Configuring an Archive Host
To create an Archive Host, add it to the hosts file just as any other host
$Conf{XferMethod} = 'archive';
To further customise the archive's parameters you can adding the changed
-parameters in the host's config.pl file. The parameters are explained in the config.pl
-file.
+parameters in the host's config.pl file. The parameters are explained in
+the config.pl file. Parameters may be fixed or the user can be allowed
+to change them (eg: output device).
-The example archive programs included with BackupPC are for a CD and
-Tape archive. The programs are called BackupPC_archivecd and
-BackupPC_archivetape. These are specified by the ArchiveClientCmd configuration
-parameter.
+The per-host archive command is $Conf{ArchiveClientCmd}. By default
+this invokes __INSTALLDIR__/BackupPC_archiveHost, which you can
+copy and customize as necessary.
=head2 Starting an Archive
=head1 Copyright
-Copyright (C) 2001-2003 Craig Barratt
+Copyright (C) 2001-2004 Craig Barratt
=head1 Credits
projects / BackupPC.git / blobdiff