Home data backup recipe

Ok, I've finally decided to get off my butt and do something about making backups of all the precious family data. Up until now it has just been waiting to fall into a digital black hole.

Ingredients

• one linux server
• enough hard disk space to make backups
• family PCs running Windows that have precious data on them
• a home network
• General information about using snapshot/rsync backup method
• snapback2 backup software
  

From here on, I'll suppose that the server, windows PCs and network are already installed.

To get a working backup system, do the following

• Install Config::ApacheFormat from CPAN

• perl -MCPAN -e shell

• cpan> install Config::ApacheFormat

• Install snapback2
• Create /etc/snapback2.conf containing something like this with a Directory directive for each PC
  
• Hourlies 4
  Dailies 7
  Weeklies 4
  Monthlies 12
  #AutoTime Yes
  AutoTime No
  Compress No
  Debug 4
  
  #AdminEmail backups@yourdomain.org
  AdminEmail Frank@theHarpers.biz
  AlwaysEmail Yes
  
  LogFile /var/log/snapback.log
  ChargeFile /var/log/snapback.charges
  
  Exclude core.*
  
  SnapbackRoot /etc/snapback
  
  #DestinationList /mnt/backup1 /mnt/backup2
  DestinationList /root/snapshot
  
  
  RsyncShell none
  Directory /mnt/FranksDocs/
  Directory /mnt/ArjasDocs/
  Directory /home/share/
  
  
• Run snapback2 from cron every hour
  
• 0 * * * * /usr/bin/snapback2
• Configure PCs to share documents read only
  
• Use automount and Samba to access the documents on the PC hard disks
• Put the following into /etc/auto.master
  /mnt file:/etc/auto.mnt
• For each PC add something like this into /etc/auto.mnt
• FranksDocs -fstype=smbfs,username=guest,password=,ro,fmask=755,dmask=755 ://192.168.0.4/FranksDocs
  
• make sure automount is started at boot time (symbolic link in /etc/rc5.d)
  
• Export backups locally read-only through NFS (/etc/exports)
  
• /root/snapshot/localhost/mnt/FranksDocs 127.0.0.1(secure,ro,no_root_squash)
• execute exportfs -a
  
• Mount read-only file system accessible to users (/etc/fstab)
  
• 127.0.0.1:/root/snapshot/localhost/mnt/FranksDocs /snapshot/FranksDocs nfs ro,addr=127.0.0.1 0 0
• create mount point /snapshot/FranksDocs
• Export using Samba so users can access their backups
  
• Create /etc/samba/smb.conf
• # Global Parameters
  [global]
  workgroup = HARPER
  security = SHARE
  server string =
  #printing = CUPS
  #printcap name = CUPS
  disable spoolss = Yes
  #show add printer wizard = No
  wins support = yes
• [SaveFrank]
  comment = Recover old versions of Frank's files here
  path = /snapshot/FranksDocs
  read only = Yes
  force user = share
  force group = famille
  guest ok = Yes
  nt acl support = No
  
• That's it you're done