Hi there, On Sun, 10 May 2026, backuppc@sundquist... wrote:
... working on G.W. Haywood's excellent instructions ...
You're too kind. Let's see if they work. :)
... I had to first set up a new machine. The machine that crashed was a raspberry pi (with a nvme instead of an SD card - still crashed), so I am ditching that and went with a miniPC. I installed a flavor of ubuntu. ...
Since November 2019 I've been using a Raspberry Pi as one of several backup servers, and it's been fine. To my mind there will always be questions about USB-connected drives, but after what I think I'd have to call a fairly shaky start with them on the older (pre-Pi3B+) Pis they seem to have settled down well with one notable exception. That (unfortunately) is my wife's desktop machine, which for years has been dropping its USB-attached disc after uptimes of anything between a few days and a few weeks. We're still looking for the problem. Replacing hardware and software wholesale has so far failed to pinpoint it. All our other Pis have been fine even as fairly heavily loaded (for a Pi:) database servers. OTOH *every* mini PC that I've used has, without exception, been solid. I'm not trying to influence anyone in either direction. Just adding a bit of information about my experience. If I needed to spin up a server right now I'd grab a Pi off the shelf as it's just sitting there, maybe upgrade later if it gave any trouble or wasn't fast enough. The one thing I would say about performance on the Pis is that I *really* notice the difference between running the backup software on a Pi and running it on a VM using two of 16 cores on an AMD Ryzen - but I *only* really notice it when I'm running some off-the-wall BackupPC_zcat command to trawl through a compressed log. I'm not sure that the modest difference in performance is worth the less modest difference in price but when you need your backup, then at that point it's probably priceless...
... ... the CGI interface can't write config files, getting "TextFileWrite: Failed to write /etc/backuppc/localhost.pl.new" when I try to save ... ... I saw the apache user group (www-data) didn't have write access so I added group write access to the directory and some files: ... But still isn't working.
I'm not sure if you have told us the user:group ownership of directory /etc/backuppc, but if as I suspect it's backuppc:backuppc then adding group write won't allow apache2 - running as www-data:www-data - to write in there unless you also add the www-data user to the backuppc group. Plus it's trying to write "localhost.pl.new" that fails, not "localhost.pl", so changing the perms on "localhost.pl" won't help either. (BackupPC in this case writes a new file, and then moves it into place over the original, to make the operation more 'atomic'.)
Apache is running as www-data (user and group): ... Any suggestions? ...
For BackupPC, yes, running Apache as www-data:www-data will need some work on the configuration. Assuming that your instance of Apache will only be serving BackupPC (and I think allowing it to serve other sites as well is insane) then I'd suggest that you change the User and Group in the Apache config to run as backuppc:backuppc. Make sure that you lock down access to Apache, you don't want just anybody having access to your backups, and, obviously, after changing Apache's configuration you will need to restart it. You don't actually need to run Apache at all - BackupPC will still make your backups. One of my backup servers doesn't even have Apache installed so that it's a little bit stealthy. -- 73, Ged. _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/wiki Project: https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/
