Hi there,
Like many others I've been happily using 3.x for a good few years. I
absolutely love it. Most of the time I'm backing up a mixture of
Linux and Windoze boxes, a few dozen machines in total. Backup stores
are distributed, each is of the order of 2TBytes with backups aged up
to a few years. Nothing very taxing nor special.
Now that 4.1.0 is out it seems like it might be time to try it, so on
27th March I installed it from the 06:26 24th March 2017 tarball on
Github, onto an old Debian machine that was sitting around. This
machine was originally a 'Squeeze' box, but has been updated over the
years via 'Wheezy' to 'Jessie'. I had some problems with systemd, and
for that reason I uninstalled it from the machine some time ago.
Given what follows, this might be relevant.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Initially after I installed what I thought I needed for 4.1.0, there
was nothing but '500's from the Web interface. Although I had earlier
installed Debian's libhttp-request-ascgi-perl:
6426 2017-03-27 16:04:30 BST apt-get install libhttp-request-ascgi-perl
something wasn't right. I installed SCGI from CPAN (SCGI-0.6.tar.gz).
and that worked. Pretty much everything else on the box is installed
from Debian packages, so I expected there might be some hiccups, it's
no big deal. I could and probably should have investigated more, but
CPAN was quicker. Maybe if I'd tried starting from scratch with the
BackupPC install it would have found the Debian package, and maybe the
install script should have looked for something it didn't look for.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
So far, so good. I configured a single share on a Windows Server to
be backed up and left it overnight to back up. Seemed to work fine.
The next job the following day was to add a second share on the same
machine. Now here begins the fun. The first share is of course 'C$'
and the second is 'N$'. But I couldn't get BackupPC to notice the
second share by creating a config.pl fragment:
# cat /data/BackupPC/pc/win2k8server/config.pl | grep -v ^#
$Conf{SmbShareName} = ['C$','N$'];
but AFAICT it has no effect - long line broken with backslash-escaped
newlines for this mail:
/.../bin/BackupPC_zcat XferLOG.2.z | head | grep Running
Running: /usr/bin/smbclient \\\\win2k8server\\C\$ -I 192.168.0.249\
-U Administrator -E -d 1 -c tarmode\ full -TcN\
/data/BackupPC/pc/win2k8server/timeStamp.level0 -
No complaints in the logs. Just no mention of the second share.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
So I tried restarting BackupPC:
7097 2017-03-30 12:49:22 BST /etc/init.d/backuppc restart
and leaving it a while. Bad idea.
Nagios monitors almost everything here, and after an hour I noticed
that the machine's CPU temperatures were rather elevated. There were
several BackupPC_Admin_SCGI processes running on the machine, eating
100% CPU, and in the LOG, endlessly repeating, there was (long second
line below broken for this mail):
2017-03-30 13:49:50 Running BackupPC_Admin_SCGI (pid=32343)
cannot bind to port 12345: Address already in use at\
/usr/local/BackupPC/bin/BackupPC_Admin_SCGI line 156.
I tried killing these processes but BackupPC just started them again:
7112 2017-03-30 13:49:51 BST killall BackupPC_Admin_SCGI
7113 2017-03-30 13:49:54 BST ps axufw | grep -i backup
7114 2017-03-30 13:49:57 BST killall BackupPC_Admin_SCGI
7115 2017-03-30 13:49:59 BST ps axufw | grep -i backup
so I killed BackupPC itself:
7116 2017-03-30 13:50:06 BST killall BackupPC
although later when I looked at the LOG I wondered if that had been
strictly necessary:
2017-03-30 13:49:51 Running BackupPC_Admin_SCGI (pid=32344)
2017-03-30 13:49:51 Running BackupPC_Admin_SCGI (pid=32346)
2017-03-30 13:49:57 Running BackupPC_Admin_SCGI (pid=32351)
2017-03-30 13:50:06 Got signal TERM... cleaning up (exit code = 0)
Restarting was uneventful:
7120 2017-03-30 13:50:48 BST /etc/init.d/backuppc start
LOG:
2017-03-30 13:50:48 Reading hosts file
2017-03-30 13:50:48 BackupPC started, pid 32382
2017-03-30 13:50:48 Running BackupPC_Admin_SCGI (pid=32383)
2017-03-30 13:50:48 Next wakeup is 2017-03-30 14:00:00
2017-03-30 14:00:00 Next wakeup is 2017-03-30 15:00:00
----------------------------------------------------------------------
By March 31st I gave up and edited the master /etc/BackupPC/config.pl
and it "sort of" worked. It said it backed up the 'N$' share. I see
that the last backup in 4.x is now supposed to be always filled, but
unfortunately there are no files in my 'N$' share backup. Just empty
directories. Maybe I missed something in the docs. I started on the
docs from the 4.x Web interface, it said:
"Features include:
A clever pooling scheme minimizes disk storage and disk
I/O. Identical files across multiple backups of the same or
different PC are stored only once (using hard links) ..."
Is this right? This looks like V3.x to me.
It also said, under "Incremental Backup"
[ ... "For SMB and tar, BackupPC uses the modification time (mtime) to
determine which files have changed since the last backup. That means
SMB and tar incrementals are not able to detect deleted files, renamed
files or new files whose modification time is prior to the last
lower-level backup.]
I guess this means that if you add a share to an existing backup tree
you have to start with a full backup to get any files copied?
The same section says
[BackupPC "fills-in" incremental backups when browsing or restoring,
based on the levels of each backup, giving every backup a "full"
appearance. This makes browsing and restoring backups much easier ...]
But not if you've just added the share and it hasn't done a full yet?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
BTW - what's with these timestamps?
# >>> ls -lrt
total 588
drwxr-x--- 4 ged ged 4096 Mar 28 22:04 0
-rw-r----- 1 ged ged 470620 Mar 28 22:04 XferLOG.0.z
drwxr-x--- 4 ged ged 4096 Mar 29 21:00 2
-rw-r----- 1 ged ged 42686 Mar 29 21:00 XferLOG.1.z
-rw-r----- 1 ged ged 309 Mar 30 21:00 backups.old
drwxr-x--- 4 ged ged 4096 Mar 30 21:00 1
-rw-r----- 1 ged ged 1245 Mar 30 21:00 LOG.032017
-rw-r----- 1 ged ged 363 Mar 30 21:00 backups
-rw-r----- 1 ged ged 42464 Mar 30 21:00 XferLOG.2.z
drwxr-x--- 2 ged ged 12288 Mar 30 21:00 refCnt
-rw-r----- 1 ged ged 0 Mar 31 15:00 LOCK
Timestamps are very important to me, I even give some of the commands
that I use frequently a single-letter alias with the output sorted in
timestamp order. I'm a very timestamp-oriented person and I've kinda
grown used to the idea that older backups will have older timestamps.
After three backup runs, the timestamps on the backup directories for
this machine are all over the place. The MMYYYY bit in the filenames
would be much better as YYYYMM.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Finally, the Web interface has a habit of breaking and wrapping file-
names which is unhelpful. The display of whitespace etc. in filenames
could be much improved, just in case the files are on Windows boxes.
Perhaps filenames could be higlighted in some way, so that if a name
ends in a space it's visible? You might well ask why users insist on
typing random whitespace in file names, and naturally I have done the
same many times. It's just a sad fact of life.
--
73,
Ged.
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