Creating Archives from BackupPC
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.
