BackupPC from RPM on Fedora Core or related systems.

I decided recently to try BackupPC at one of our sites; one of the advantages it has is the ability to back each file it finds up once, and only once, saving much space on the backup device. This would be a secondary backup, but being disk based should allow faster recovery of files than our existing solution does (although the media changer is fast, it still isn't disk access).

Configuring it on Fedora Core 9 was easy, although not obvious what was required thanks to fairly spartan documentation.

Fedora Core 9 includes a RPM install for the product, so that part is easy. What isn't so easy is to know what to do once it is installed.

The first step for me was to ensure the web interface was available. Doing so requires simply running


htpasswd -c /etc/BackupPC/apache.users accountname


where accountname is whatever user name you wish to use to access the web interface. The command will request a password and confirmation of the password and then terminate. Once this is done, if you have a browser on the local machine, you can use http://localhost/BackupPC (case sensitive) to access the UI. As I don't run a GUI on the server, I modified /etc/http/conf.d/BackupPC.conf by adding a new allow from myip line, where myip is the administration machine's IP address.

Once this is done, I could type http://backupmachine/BackupPC and log in using the user name and password I had configured. Obviously not much of interest is found here yet, but it is nice to had the admin interface online first, as you can see the results of configuration steps as they are made, verifying your intent.

Next steps: Creating the SSH keys and adding clients.