My Weekend BackupPC Linux Maintenance Activities

Over the weekend I decided to update the storage on my Kubuntu (9.04) 64 bit machine running running KDE 4.3.2. I was beginning to run out of space for backups using BackupPC. I've used it for over a year to keep versioned disk copies of all my machines (Windows 2000, Windows XP, kubuntu, and Ubuntu server). I added a 1TB Samsung energy efficient drive (SAMSUNG EcoGreen F2 HD103SI 1TB 5400 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive) from NewEgg for $80 with free shipping.

I then got a ton of useful information on redirecting where BackupPC stores it's backup file pool from this article (moving the BackupPC pool to a new hardrive). I installed, formatted, mounted the new drive as /media/1TB and created a directory called /media/1TB/backuppc. I used the process:
  1. stopping BackupPC (sudo /etc/init.d/backuppc stop)
  2. copying the backup pool (sudo cp -dpR /var/lib/backuppc/. /media/1TB/backuppc/)
  3. renaming the current pool (sudo mv /var/lib/backuppc/ /var/lib/backuppc.orig)
  4. creating a symbolic link from the old location to the new drive (sudo ln -s /media/1TB/backuppc/ /var/lib/backuppc)
  5. starting BackupPC (sudo /etc/init.d/backuppc start)
  6. and when I was sure it was all working well - deleting the old backup pool (sudo rm -RI /var/lib/backuppc.orig)
The biggest suprise was the 4 hours it took to copy the pool too the new hardrive and the 1 hour it took to remove the old pool once I was sure everything was working correctly. Overall the process was scary, but happened without incident. Now I've got at least a few years of file proliferation before it becomes a problem again.

Comments

  1. AnonymousMay 12, 2011 at 5:18 AM

    Thanx, I know I'm gonna need to do this at some point!

    ReplyDelete

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