Hi, In my search for backup software I settle down on afbackup. I would say it's an excellent piece of software with GUI interface for configuration + build-in help. It's powerful, flexible and simple enough for small clusters of Linux boxes and single Linux box.
Unfortunately setting it up was not trivial, primarily because I did not quite realize how the basic installation should look like. I decided to summarise it for non-experienced users like me. PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: We want to backup 6 Debian (slink) Linux boxes. WHAT WORKS: 1. Install afbackup-client on all computers that you want to backup. 2. Install afbackup on one computer that is supposed to be server. It's likely to have afbackup-client installed on it,as you want to bakup it too. 3. configure them. Configuration programs have GUI, they are terrific and very understandable. Read /usr/doc/afbackup-client/CONFIG. First select small directory to backup. Read /usr/doc/afbackup/HOWTO.FAQ.DO-DONT if you want to backup on disk 4. Run "full_backup" as root on one of clients 5. Check on you server that backup is made, check your email for notification. 6. Come back to client and restore backup using "afrestore -a -C /tmp" Your backup will be restored in /tmp. Now you can run "diff -r" to see that indeed everything was succesfully recovered. 7. Now you can automate and enhance it. Create cron jobs for full_backup and incr_backup. Add more directoies for backup. WHAT DOES NOT WORK: After reading documentation, man pages, mail archive I thought that the program I should run is "afbackup", it seemed natural as that's the name of the package after all. My idea was to run periodically following programs on server: afbackup -h linux_box_1 -X full_backup -k /etc/afbackup/cryptkey afbackup -h linux_box_2 -X full_backup -k /etc/afbackup/cryptkey afbackup -h linux_box_3 -X full_backup -k /etc/afbackup/cryptkey afbackup -h linux_box_4 -X full_backup -k /etc/afbackup/cryptkey Centralised process, no clashes, but afbackup = afclient = Does not work. Briefly it's a specail type of installation (remote client) of afbackup-client that is missing in slink. Please correct me if I'm wrong here. You can make it work if you install on all computers both "afbackup" and "afbackup-client" packages. Actually you need just few files from "afbackup" to be added to your "afbackup-client". Again: It's not original afbackup code fault, just this configuration is missing in Debian. This configuration is assumed in the code. CRITICISM: Document that helped me a lot is called "PROGRAMS" in original afbackup distribution. It is missing in Debian distribution. Hope that may help other people to setup their backup. Sasha.