I find that 'backuppcfs.pl' (BackupPC FUSE filesystem) is INFINITELY
more powerful and useful than BackuPC_ls or any other official tool
for finding and reading files in BackupPC.
I have long thought that this *simple* script should be added to the
standard BackupPC distro as it is so incredibly powerful and useful.
See below for what it does...
@GEG - what do you think about adding it?
It hasn't been updated in forever but it still seems to work
perfectly. There might be opportunities to improve caching efficiency
and speed (perhaps rewrite in 'C') as well as adding extended
attributes (ACLs and SELinux) to the extent that they are already
supported in BackupPC and rsync.
Presumably AI could be helpful here
Using the above script mounts ALL your BackupPC backups across all
hosts and backup numbers as FUSE filesystems. Backups can be accessed
as:
<mount point>/<host>/<backup_number>/<share>/<path-to-file>
OR
<mount point>/<host>/<backup-date-time>/<share>/<path-to-file>
With special links for:
<mount point>/<host>/oldest/<share>/<path-to-file>
<mount point>/<host>/latest/<share>/<path-to-file>
You can use all your favorite Gnu/Linux tools to list, find, grep,
read, word count, sed, etc your backup files.
Only limitation is that the mount is (obviously) read-only.
I always keep the BackupPC FUSE file system mounted which allows me to
easily browse, find, and retrieve individual old copies. In fact, it
is so useful that I essentilly never use tools like BackupPC_ls
anymore.
No extra computation is needed until you start accessing the backuppc
fuse file system but lookups are cached so that repeated access to a
directory tree gets faster after the first access.
Bill Fahrenkrug wrote at about 09:38:56 -0700 on Saturday, November 7, 2026:
> Thanks for the feedback!
>
> To clarify:the script actually uses |BackupPC_ls|under the hood!It’s
> designed as an automation wrapper around it.
>
> While |BackupPC_ls|works great for inspecting a specific
> snapshot,running it by hand has a few pain points when you don't know
> where or when a file lived:
>
> *
>
> *Scope:*|BackupPC_ls|requires you to specify a single host (|-h|)
> and a single backup run (|-n|).If you have 10 hosts with 30
> historical backups each,you would have to run it hundreds of times
> manually.
>
> *
>
> *Automation:*The wrapper queries |pc/<host>/backups|to automatically
> walk through all historical snapshots (|--all|),can sweep across all
> hosts at once (|all|),and prefixes matches with the host name and
> backup number so you immediately know where to restore from.
>
> I'll update the GitHub README to make that distinction much clearer.
>
> Adding it to the BackupPC Wiki is a great idea—I'll get a page/link
> added there so others running into the same issue can find it
> easily.Thanks for pointing me in that direction!
>
>
> On 11/7/26 7:06 AM, G.W. Haywood wrote:
> > Hi there,
> >
> > On Sat, 7 Nov 2026, Bill Fahrenkrug wrote:
> >
> >> I have been using BackupPC for 10+ years and have gone though many
> >> workstations. I don't restore all of my documents or other files to
> >> my new workstation, I normally want to start with a clean slate. But
> >> sometimes I need to find that one file I should have. Using the the
> >> web interface and clicking through all the different folders looking
> >> for a file was painful to say the least.
> >
> > Agreed the Web interface isn't great for doing this sort of thing. :/
> >
> >> I searched the list many times and didn't find a good solution.
> >
> > Doesn't the BackupPC_ls script help with what you need to do?
> >
> >> So I created a bash script to find files using regex pattern and
> >> thought I would share.
> >>
> >> It's on Git Hub. the README includes how to install and some examples.
> >>
> >> https://github.com/wfahren/BackupPC_find_file
> >
> > It might be useful to contrast your script with BAckupPC_ls, and maybe
> > put your script in the BackupPC Wiki:
> >
> > https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/wiki
> >
> > That's probably the best place to collect itches that need a scratch.
> >
> _______________________________________________
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> Wiki: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/wiki
> Project: https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/
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