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#1 2009-06-29 19:52:42

markharthan
New member
Registered: 2009-06-29
Posts: 1

BackupPC with client driven backups?

Hi,

I've had a good look around and can't find anything already posted on this, but apologies if I've missed something obvious (either here, or on the internets).

I've got myself a DNS-323 and am busy setting up BackupPC on it.  It is almost exactly what I want, with one (admittedly pretty minor) exception.

What I'd ideally like to do is this:

- Have the DNS-323 sat behind a router which is hooked up to the internet via a dynamic IP.
- Have multiple PCs across the internet backing up to this DNS-323.  Again, all of these PCs will be sat behind routers with dynamic IPs
- Have incremental, *client driven* backups (i.e. only back up things that have changed).

As I understand it, BackupPC will periodically wake up and request a backup (either full or incremental) from its client list.  If nothing has changed, nothing will be backed up, but a backup set composed entirely of hard links to the already backed up files will be created.  If not all of the new/changed files can be backup up in a given session (session = client online), this will be saved as a partial and continued the next time the client is found by the backuppc server.

This is almost perfect.

What would be better (IMO) was if the *client* (i.e. a client process, not the actual human user) could connect to the backuppc host and say "I'm here, what backups do I have due?".  I guess you can (I hope) configure backuppc to poll reqularly (every 5 mins) for newly appeared clients, but it seems cleaner to have the client announce his/her presence.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Mark.

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#2 2009-06-30 19:06:48

blbrown
Member
Registered: 2007-11-02
Posts: 88
Website

Re: BackupPC with client driven backups?

So are you counting on the fact that your clients will be coming and going?  In other words, a new client might join the system today, and one might join in a couple of weeks.  They might stay around, but might not.  For each client, you don't want to have to configure the server each time...  This would be possible to implement, but I haven't seen anything around here that would solve this.

If your clients are relatively static, then my opinion is that client-initiated backups are a limiting option--each client must have a smart program installed that does the backups.  I wrote a set of scripts for a server to initiate backups where each client just needs an rsync (and SSH) daemon, both of which are available free for Linux, Windows, and Mac.  You can find it (BackupNetClone) at http://backupnetclone.sourceforge.net but you should be familiar with Linux if you want to install it successfully.  I admit that on each client I had to setup a dynamic DNS updater using my own domain name so that the server can always contact the clients, regardless of their IP address.

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