On Tue, May 5, 2026, at 12:09 PM, G.W. Haywood wrote: > First I suggest that you make a copy of your backup drive on another > medium of some sort. Put that copy somewhere safe. Next install a > new version of BackupPC the same way that you installed it originally, > for example if you used a distro package use the same distro package. > At this stage don't try to connect the old backup drive (nor the copy) > but simply get the BackupPC system working. You can use any old host > on the network as a dummy to start making backups. To get you started > set up the configuration to back up one file on it, say every hour or > something like that. > > Once you have the new BackupPC working, shut it down - so that now the > BackupPC script isn't running. Now edit the BackupPC 'hosts' file so > that it contains the hosts that you had on the original system (if you > can't remember them, the hostnames are the names of directories in the > directory .../pc/ of the BackupPC backup data store). > > At this point, if you started BackupPC, it could try to start backing > up your hosts. Presumably you won't want it to do that because you'll > have individual configurations (for example in /etc/backuppc/pc/ [*]) > for each of your hosts, and before starting the backups you'll want to > get those configuratons from a backup. You can do that as follows: > > Replace the 'new' backup store with your 'old' backup store. I'll let > you work out how to do that, from what you've written you're obviously > capable of doing it. When you've done it, you *could* start BackupPC, > but you still don't want to start backups - you still don't have your > old configurations. However, you *can* now use the tools provided by > BackupPC to get files and directories from the backup data store...
Yes, it has been over two months since this e-mail. As you may recall from this list's e-mails I had to first deal with an issue of the most recent ubuntu includes a systemd setting that makes /etc/backuppc read only. Identifying this as the problem for why I could not modify config.pl through the web interface took a while (thanks to Tomas for identifying the solution). Then I had to get "any old host on the network" backing up with the new install. Rather than "any old host", I got one of the two machines I mostly need backed up working, that being my network file server. That also took a while (this is a home network and I am not always at home with a stretch of time to work on it). I still want to get my daily-driver work machine backing up, so I wanted to follow the full advice here. I have followed the instruction up to here. Now... > 'BackupPC_ls' lets you list the files in any directory from any backup > of any share of any host. It gives you an md5sum for each file listed. > Here's an example, where I'm logged in as root on the backup server: > > 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > # su -c "/usr/local/BackupPC/bin/BackupPC_ls -h alpha -n 2235 -s Config /" > backuppc > /: > -rw-r--r-- 0/0 290 2019-09-26 01:24:33 /.fstab > (0416cfcbe01474d6f0526ffa5d890813) > drwxr-xr-x 0/0 0 2020-05-07 15:45:30 /.java/ > -rw------- 0/0 0 2019-09-26 01:05:24 /.pwd.lock > (d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e) > drwxr-x--- 0/1002 0 2026-03-26 13:55:12 /BackupPC/ > drwxr-xr-x 0/0 0 2025-02-01 16:36:24 /ImageMagick-6/ > ... > ... > > 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > As you can see, BackupPC_ls (normally) has to be run under the ID of > the backup user, usually 'backuppc' but of course that's configurable. > You give it the host name, in this case 'alpha', the backup number, in > this case 2235, the share name, in this case 'Config', and the name of > the directory that you want to list, in this case '/'. Question: I have to pass three options to BackupPC-ls. Hostname is easy. I believe Sharename is easy since I use rsync and that is just the directory name, although actually, I don't know for sure what directory I specified. Then there is backup number. I have no idea how to get this. I poked around some, but came up empty. Any suggestions? TIA > The output is > a bit like that from 'ls -l' but you get md5sums for the files (not > for directories). In my example above I've given the full path to the > BackupPC_ls utility, it will likely be different in your installation. > If you can't remember the share names, they're in the numbered backup > directories under the host name directory with 'f' prefixed to them. > The file 'backups' in the top level of the host's directory shows you > which backup numbers are full and which are incremental. > > 'BackupPC_zcat' then lets you write the content of any file to stdout. > You just give it the md5sum which BackupPC_ls provided for your file. > Below I've recovered the file '.fstab' which has the md5sum '0416cf...': > > 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > # su -c '/usr/local/BackupPC/bin/BackupPC_zcat > 0416cfcbe01474d6f0526ffa5d890813' backuppc > proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 > PARTUUID=6c586e13-01 /boot vfat defaults 0 2 > PARTUUID=6c586e13-02 / ext4 defaults,noatime 0 1 > PARTUUID=6c586e13-03 /var ext4 defaults,noatime 0 1 > # > > 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > You can redirect stdout to a file of course. That's all there is to it.
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