WHAT is "BackupPC" Exactly?

Without sounding cute – or dumb – What exactly is “BackupPC”?? I will assume it is some sort of backup program. but is it some sort image–backup program, or does it allow you to selectively backup portions of your PC, rather than just the whole bloody computer? If I need tgo backup the ENTIRE drive I simply use the dd command; if I need to backup directories etc., I use Backup Ninja. It is a very EASY program to use, and set up.

From their website: “BackupPC is written in [Perl] and extracts backup data via SMB using Samba, tar over ssh/rsh/nfs, or [rsync]”.

Not sure what to make of it. Looks like the source has not been updated in over two years.

BackupPC is an enterprise scale backup utility. It does incremental backups as well as full. Allows you to determine how long to keep the backups for both incremental as well as full. In addition to that restoring from any of these backups is a click away. I have been using BackupPC for about 15 years now rotating backups on 3 servers. It has not been updated since REHL8 however I would expect it might have another iteration for version 9. Excellent well done software does not need support. BackupPC is one of those pieces of Excellent software out there.

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It takes a while to setup so not what I would use for a single machine. It’s real benefit is when you have many similar machines. The documentation is good and I would recommend reading the section on how it works.

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Ok, but why is it not in the official repos?
I do see ‘bacula’.

It will not be a surprise if it shows up in a couple more months. It took Nvidia a few months to catch up to RHEL9 so maybe give it a few months. It took them awhile to roll out for Version 8 as well (their last update)

I use it on two CentOS 7 servers and one Rocky 8 server to back up multiple Windows machines as well as a Netgear NAS and the servers themselves. I use external USB drives to hold the backup data on two servers and SATA drives on another server. It’s quite stable so it hasn’t needed any updates.

BackupPC runs as a background service that spawns backup jobs for each client. Backups are full or incremental. Several methods are available for pulling the data from the clients. I use rsync+ssh and rsyncd, but tar and smb are also available. The service is controlled by a web interface, which can be hosted under either Apache or Nginx. Email is sent when there’s a problem backing up a client.

Backups are stored in a common pool of compressed files, which “de-duplicates” files common across many clients. Which is great for Windows, where every system shares most of the OS files. An actual client backup is a tree of pointers to the common pool. In BackupPC 3 this was done through hard links. With BackupPC 4, hard links were replaced with file-based references, which makes backup of BackupPC’s own data over rsync much faster. (Rsync’s memory usage explodes with lots of hard links.)

EPEL 9.x Repo has been updated to include BackupPC now. Happy days!

Updated and running w/o issue on my system.