afbackup: comments and problems.
Hi,
In my search for backup software I settle down on afbackup. I would say
it's an excellent piece of software with GUI interface for configuration
+ build-in help. It's powerful, flexible and simple enough for small
clusters of Linux boxes and single Linux box.
Unfortunately setting it up was not trivial, primarily because I did not
quite realize how the basic installation should look like. I decided to
summarise it for non-experienced users like me.
PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: We want to backup 6 Debian (slink) Linux boxes.
WHAT WORKS:
1. Install afbackup-client on all computers that you want to backup.
2. Install afbackup on one computer that is supposed to be server. It's
likely to have afbackup-client installed on it,as you want to bakup it too.
3. configure them. Configuration programs have GUI, they are terrific and
very understandable. Read /usr/doc/afbackup-client/CONFIG. First select
small directory to backup. Read /usr/doc/afbackup/HOWTO.FAQ.DO-DONT if
you want to backup on disk
4. Run "full_backup" as root on one of clients
5. Check on you server that backup is made, check your email for
notification.
6. Come back to client and restore backup using "afrestore -a -C /tmp"
Your backup will be restored in /tmp. Now you can run "diff -r" to see that
indeed everything was succesfully recovered.
7. Now you can automate and enhance it. Create cron jobs for full_backup
and incr_backup. Add more directoies for backup.
WHAT DOES NOT WORK:
After reading documentation, man pages, mail archive I thought that the
program I should run is "afbackup", it seemed natural as that's the name of
the package after all. My idea was to run periodically following programs
on server:
afbackup -h linux_box_1 -X full_backup -k /etc/afbackup/cryptkey
afbackup -h linux_box_2 -X full_backup -k /etc/afbackup/cryptkey
afbackup -h linux_box_3 -X full_backup -k /etc/afbackup/cryptkey
afbackup -h linux_box_4 -X full_backup -k /etc/afbackup/cryptkey
Centralised process, no clashes, but afbackup = afclient = Does not work.
Briefly it's a specail type of installation (remote client) of
afbackup-client that is missing in slink. Please correct me if I'm wrong here.
You can make it work if you install on all computers both "afbackup" and
"afbackup-client" packages. Actually you need just few files from
"afbackup" to be added to your "afbackup-client". Again: It's not original
afbackup code fault, just this configuration is missing in Debian. This
configuration is assumed in the code.
CRITICISM:
Document that helped me a lot is called "PROGRAMS" in original afbackup
distribution. It is missing in Debian distribution.
Hope that may help other people to setup their backup.
Sasha.
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