Hi there, On Tue, 11 Aug 2026, John Cusick wrote:
There are days when I find my situation a little overwhelming :)
There's a T-shirt around here somewhere with that printed on it. :)
I'm presently running BackupPC on a fedora 44 server. The server has been directly upgraded once too often ... various issues booting ...
:(
Once up BackupPC runs great, as usual (thanks to all the developers)
:)
What I would like to do is completely rebuild the server from scratch while backing up the entire BackupPC system (configs and backup directory) to a seperate USB hard drive. After rebuilding the server, I would like to just restore the /etc/BackupPC directory and the /var/lib/BackupPC directory after reinstalling the fedora BackupPC rpm package. It seems to me that the easiest way is to use rsync to archive these two directories and restore them after the rebuild.
If I were going to do that I think I'd probably make a tarball to keep safe somewhere afterwards for a while, but rsync will do what you need.
Am I missing anything?
No, I don't think so. During development I've routinely renamed an entire /var/lib/BackupPC/pc/ directory tree and started from scratch with no issues. I tend not to mess with the pools, but only because they're so very big. All in all it's pretty resilient. If you wish, /var/lib/BackupPC can be a symlink (it can be on another filesystem).
Do I need to use the -H switch, for example, to preserve hardlinks?
No. Assuming that you stop BackupPC while you do the transfer there will be no hard links to worry about. BackupPC V4 does use hard links temporarily to do e.g. 'atomic' renames, so you can't use filesystems which don't support them for BackupPC storage, but if BackupPC isn't running there won't be any hard links in the BackupPC data store other than perhaps - very unlikely - cruft left over from unclean shutdowns.
Is there anything else I should be aware of before using this method?
Assuming you have no V3 backups then no, I don't think so. Make a fallback plan, just iust in case all goes belly up. Don't rush it. Make sure you go all the way to the bottoms of the directory trees. Do a bit of work testing after you've done it - e.g. restore q few random files and compare with what you expect.
I did search through the email archives before asking ...
My preference is to download the entire list archive and then use 'grepmail' to pull out interesting stuff. As V3 installations have, over about the past decade, gradually become more or less historical, discussions about hard link have appeared less often on the list. If you do come across such discussions in your searches I recommend that you check which BackupPC version(s) the participants are discussing.
Thanks for your time.
You're very welcome. :) -- 73, Ged. _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/wiki Project: https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/
