Les Mikesell wrote: > Brian Butler wrote: > >> Is it possible copy the contents of the backup directory to an external >> USB hard drive to take offsite? Of course the external USB Hard drive >> will need sufficient disk space to copy the contents over, but are there >> any other issues? >> >> I envision the process to be: >> >> 1. Connect the External USB Hard Drive to the BackupPC server >> 2. Mount the Drive, if not automatic >> 3. Stop the BackupPC daemon process on the server >> 4. From a shell command prompt, issue a copy command to duplicate the >> contents and permissions from the BackupPC Data directory to the USB drive >> 5. Once completed, unmount the external drive >> 6. Disconnect the external drive >> 7. Restart the BackupPC daemon process on the server >> >> Anything I'm missing, any gotcha's. Thoughts are appreciated. >> > > This has been discussed often on the list so you can find some different > schemes mentioned in the list archvies. It will work if your backups > are very small, but the pooling scheme uses a large number of hard links > that are inefficient to duplicate with ordinary file-oriented copying > methods (cp, rsync, tar, etc.) and it will be too slow to be practical > for most people. If your backuppc directory is on a separate mounted > partition (which I'd recommend) and your USB drive is at least as big as > the partition, you might unmount the partition and do a raw image copy > to the USB disk to get a working copy in a few hours. > > How about a slightly different approach.....
get 2 usb drives. Format them both as ext3. Change HAL so they always mount on the same mountpoint. In my case i tell hal to not try to mount them and i manually do it via a script. install backuppc to the first drive. Make sure that you mount both drives first and give permissions at the root level for the user backuppc is running as to create files and folders first. lets say i am only backing up overnight. Then at 9am i run a cron job to turn off backuppc and unmount the drive. Then anytime during the day i can hotplug the drives. At 9pm a cron job runs to mount the new drive and switch backuppc on. Now the new drive is empty so backuppc will automatically create all the new directories and backups as required. Of course this is not a mirror, you'll have some backups on one drive and some on the other, but it does ensure that you have an easy process of rotating offsite backups. I do this is some locations and the users rotate them weekly. Regards, Les ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
