Backup Software

Not recently I have looked through the backup solution for my home zoo. After looking through a number of alternatives ( afbackup, backup-manager, backup2l, backintime, backupninja, boxbackup, cdbackup, cedar-backup2, chiark-backup, dvbackup, dvdbackup, faubackup, flexbackup, jpilot-backup, rdiff-backup, slbackup, storebackup, vbackup) I have stopped at BackupPC. There are the following reasons, why I have chosen this software:

1. Web-interface. I know, that is not important for backup software, which can be a CLI-utility, but from the other side if you have apache server running, PHP-based interface is a plus. You can configure BackupPC from browser, force a backup, view the logs and browse currently available file backupped versions in a tree viewer and retrieve the necessary version just by clicking on it.
2. It supports Linux and Windows boxes. Linux works with SSH¹⁾+TAR, or SSH²⁾+Rsync and Windows works as Samba+Tar or SSH+Rsync.
3. It supports full and incremental backups of different levels.
4. It performs per-file data compression before storing it to the pool.
5. Daemon periodically checks for host availability and performs backup when host becomes online (useful feature for notebooks and other mobile devices).

The main idea of BackupPC is the following: it goes through the data tree to backup and retrieves only new/modified files since the last backup. The files are fetched to local filesystem and are organized in a pool, so if several clients have the same file, it will be cached only once. For home users this feature is not beneficial, as usually all boxes have different non-relative information to backup. This a behaviour of most backup software (backintime, rdiff-backup, etc).

During setting up of my notebook I've met the following problem: unfortunately, the NetBIOS Windows name was not visible from Linux box. First I thought that Samba server has to be configured appropriately. Playing with wins support = yes and domain master = yes configuration options has not given the desired result. I have also checked registry setting for LanManager (see 1 and 2 and 3 and 4), thinking that it is running in «hidden» mode. Finally I've traced the network traffic and found out, that broadcast UDP packets do not pass though WiFi router in direction to Windows box, what I found strange.