On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 10:59 PM, Jim Durand <jdur...@hrsg.ca> wrote:
> Hey guys! Doing my best to get up to speed with Backuppc, pretty
> impressive so far. Logs are filled with “backuppc_link got error -4”
> errors, and from the research I have done it seems that because my TopDir
> (/mnt/sdb1) and the cpool location (/home/users/backuppc/data/cpool) are on
> different filesystems, hard links will obviously fail. Is the answer to
> soft link “ln –s /mnt/sdb1 /home/users/backuppc/topdir” and change TopDir
> in config.pl to the “/home/users/backuppc/topdir”? It can’t be that easy,
> right?
>
My recommendation is to not change the TopDir spec even for those version
of BPC that allow it.
My approach is to have a dedicated filesystem for BPC's data, and ideally
this should be one that allows for "live" in-use maintenance - expansion,
disk swaps. LVM being a good example in low-end environments.
Just bind mount in fstab the partition you want to use for storage in the
place where backuppc wants it (should be /var/lib/backuppc with the debian
family packages).
Or put a symlink there pointing to the location you want, works just as
well, as long as you remember it's "just" a symlink for any other tools you
use that need to traverse it - IMO bind mounts are "lower level" and thus
more transparent to user-space tools.
If you do this before the install, everything should land in the right
place and get the right permissions. As you've seen the critical thing is
that the pool/cpool/pc directories must all be in the same filesystem so
hardlinks can work and with versions before 3.2 you can't change the TOPDIR
location after the initial setup
Don't be afraid to wipe and start over a few times while you're getting to
know BPC, it's good practice. Note that once BPC is up and running you
won't have to pay too much attention to it and you'll likely forget much of
what you learned at this stage, so document everything you do and why you
did it,
--------------------
I've also taken this a step further and moved my config and log folders to
below TOPDIR so everything related to BackupPC is self-contained to the one
filesystem. Note that as far as BPC is concerned everything appears to
still remain in the expected filesystem locations, it's not aware of the
bind mounts and/or symlink magic.
This allows the whole shebang to be easily transferred to a new host for
maintenance/upgrade/disaster recovery situations, doesn't need to be the
underlying OS, just (roughly) the same version of BPC - I've done testing
moving from our production server (CentOS) to a "temporary restore server"
on a generic desktop running both Ubuntu and even via a Live-CD-only Grml
boot disc - (Grml is a system rescue CD package which bundles BackupPC) and
everything "just worked".
To make this even easier, my LVM-over-RAID filesystem is self-contained in
an external drive housing connected via eSata.
====================
Note that the latter bit isn't common, but the top AFAIK is normal
practice. I'm a relative noob here, so if you read anything from the more
experienced users posted here that contradicts anything I say, follow their
advice.
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