I’ve been using BackupPC for many many years, and it’s saved my bacon more than once—whether it’s rescuing a stray document or recovering corrupted configuration files.
Infrastructure
My backup system has evolved through several generations. It began with BackupPC installed alongside the general OS, then transitioned to virtual machines, moved to dedicated hardware, and has now reached its latest iteration: dedicated hardware running in a Docker environment.
Running BackupPC in an isolating system separated from general-purpose hardware has minimized its attack surface; I’ve created a strong line of defense against malware and, more notably, ransomware.
Disaster History
One of my mishaps, when it has proven its worth:
I had BackupPC set up on my main home Linux machine, with backups stored on a separate disk, and the entire BackupPC installation mounted at /BACKUPPC. Everything was running smoothly until one day, disaster struck—a power failure that wreaked havoc on my system. My root partition was severely damaged, with ext3 reporting a 30% shrinkage and an 80% structure loss. In other words, there was no way I was getting that data back with fsck.
Then it hit me—BackupPC was still intact, with a backup just 18 hours old. I quickly booted up Fedora from a USB stick, mounted the BackupPC directory, and initiated a clean and restore cycle with a few simple commands:
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda2
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/sda2
(cd /BACKUPPC/sbin; BackupPC_createTar -h machineName | (cd /mnt/sda2; tar xvf -)
After 30-40 minutes, my machine returned to its pristine state as if nothing had happened.
So, if you haven’t set up a backup yet, do it now! You never know when it might save you from disaster, just like BackupPC did for me.