BackupPC appliance

Nobody wants backup. Everybody wants restore…

BackupPC is a nice “to-disk” backup solution with a convenient web frontend. Restores are easy, even for those in my household who do not tame computers for a living.

I recently bought a Longshine LCS-8311 NAS device for the sole purpose to make it a BackupPC-appliance. The original firmware was some kind of linux, but lasted only some minutes until my serial console cable was ready. There is a project called OpenNAS using similar hardware, which has detailed information about flashing new firmware into this device.

Required tools:

• thttpd
• samba
• perl
• File::RsyncP
• compress::Zlib
• coreutils (su)
• iputils (ping)

File::RsyncP make test complains about some failing bitshifts, despite of having off_t already at a size of 8. Needs to be fixed…

RsyncClientCmd:

/bin/ssh -i /home/backuppc/.ssh/id_rsa.db -l backuppc $host sudo $rsyncPath $argList+

Backup is SLOW. But OTOH the load on the client is negligble.