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As I talked about in a previous post about BackupPC, it is a very powerful tool when is comes to doing self-hosted backups. The downside is when you want to archive out a machine. For example, you have backups of a host, but the host is long gone, and you just want to archive the data. Well there are 2 ways to go about this. Either you can use the web interface to create a restore.tar/zip file to download (which doesn’t always work, especially if done over the internet), or you can create the tar backup on the server, compress, md5, and download it using sftp. I like the second option. Mostly because I’m going through it right now. I have a backup server out in the cloud that I need to archive some 50 hosts from, so here is how I did it.

Simply log into the server and su to the backuppc user and go to where ever you want an archive.

/usr/share/backuppc/bin/BackupPC_tarCreate -h nameOfHost -n -1 -s '/home' / > ./home.tar

In the example above, I’m getting an archive of the home directory for host “nameOfHost”. You can do this for any backed up folder. Once done, you can create an md5sum of the file to help verify you got it downloaded right. You can also bzip2 the file and hopefully make it smaller. Even md5sum that one as well.

Either way, if is a great way to get very large archives created so you don’t have to go through the browser for everything. Feel free to script it, that’s what I did. I was able to start the archive and let it run over the weekend before downloading once the work week started again.

Did this command work for you? Did it not? What did work for you? Please let me know in the comments.

A while back, Dropbox dropped a lot of support for Linux, such as dropping XFS and EncFS, which broke a lot of users. It ended up causing problems for me at work because we use CentOS and all of the sudden, Glibc is now too old to even run dropbox headless. Eventually I gave up on Dropbox and started just using it for simple things through the web browser, but then I discovered rclone.

Using rclone, I was not only able to view everything in Dropbox (which by the way, my company uses Okta for single sign-on, and this still worked) but I was able to mount Dropbox to my local file system! For those of you familiar with webdav, this works in a similar way. When you “mount” Dropbox it doesn’t download anything like when you use the app. It all works online. Put files into the mounted folder, and they will upload.

Getting started is pretty easy, the following commands were taken from https://rclone.org/dropbox/.

rclone config
n) New remote
d) Delete remote
q) Quit config
e/n/d/q> n
name> remote
Type of storage to configure.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
[snip]
XX / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
[snip]
Storage> dropbox
Dropbox App Key - leave blank normally.
app_key>
Dropbox App Secret - leave blank normally.
app_secret>
Edit advanced config? (y/n)
y) Yes
n) No
y/n> n
Remote config
Use auto config?
 * Say Y if not sure
 * Say N if you are working on a remote or headless machine
y) Yes
n) No
y/n> Y
If your browser doesn't open automatically go to the following link: http://127.0.0.1:53682/auth
Log in and authorize rclone for access
Waiting for code...
Got code
--------------------
[dropbox]
type = dropbox
token = {"access_token":"BIG LONG TOKEN HIDDEN","token_type":"bearer","expiry":"0001-01-01T00:00:00Z"}
--------------------
y) Yes this is OK
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d> y
Current remotes:
 
Name                 Type
====                 ====
dropbox              dropbox
 
e) Edit existing remote
n) New remote
d) Delete remote
r) Rename remote
c) Copy remote
s) Set configuration password
q) Quit config
e/n/d/r/c/s/q>

So I kind of cheated here, but basically once you are getting setup a new link will your browser, log into Dropbox and it will ask for rclone to be able to access Dropbox. Give access and your done. It is pretty easy. Now I named my dropbox dropbox, maybe dropbox wasn’t the best name to differentiate it, but oh well.

Once you get to this point you can do something like

rclone ls dropbox:

Which will get you a nice list of files you currently have in your dropbox.

Now for the fun part… mount.

There is a ton of information over here at https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/ but really, all you need to do is

rclone mount dropbox:/ /path/to/mount/point &

You must background the process to get your shell back. The mount is only active while that program is running and it does not appear in your list of mounted drives in Linux. So running something like df will not show the mount point, but what ever user you are logged in as (or that ran the command) will see files when looking in that directory.