BackupPC (and MacOS X)

BackupPC seems to be a cool application. Except for the fact that it is not easy to start working with in the first place. I downloaded BackupPC-2.0.0.tar.gz and installed it into the directory /usr/local/backuppc. Then I executed the config.pl and answered all I could. The place where I want to backup my stuff is my second hard drive /dev/hdb5 which is formatted as reiserfs and mounted at /mnt/hdb. After the config script there was a new directory in /mnt/hdb: backuppc, which contained 6 other directories: conf, cpool, log, pc, pool and trash.

BTW you cannot use a smbmount to store the backup data (at least not easily). The configure.pl script tries to chown the stuff on the smbmount and this leads to the abortion of the perl script (could be modified and the chown could be done manually by defining the correct uid and gid in the fstab). I struggled with this for a day (gave the smbmount even fmask=777,dmask=777 and the correct owner/group), but to no avail as apparently the scripts wants to execute the chown command. I probably need to solve this problem as I need to backup via the network to a Macintosh running OS X and thus need to use samba (or nfs...).

I use tar over ssh to backup my client (actually server and one of the clients are in my case physically the same machine). Anyway I have to setup ssh. As I have RH9, it's OpenSSH (ssh2).

Another client is running MacOS X (10.3). Works quite well after I figured out that the tar command on MacOS X is neither in the PATH nor in its normal location, but in /usr/bin/tar. I just made a link and BackupPC worked:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/tar /bin/tar