Backups

You have several ways to do backups in your HDA. We break them in two: full disk (bare metal) backups, and periodic backups.

They are all initiated by the client computer on to the server.

Full Disk "Bare Metal" Backups

<imagemap> Image:Backups.png|150px|Full Disk Backups default PBABackups desc bottom-left </imagemap>

The HDA now includes the Personal Backup Appliance, or PBA, with the collaboration of the PBA leader, Roland Hui.

This application is a hard disk clone, backup and restore application.

CHANGE PBA FULL BACKUP PATH

The PBA backups default path is set to /var/hda/apps/pba/backupsItalic text directory on the operating system drive. To change this to a secondary hard drive, a symbolic link is required.

• Make a sub directory backupItalic text to the filesItalic text directory on the secondary hard drive.
• Change to the /var/hda/apps/pbaItalic text directory on the operating system drive. Ensure the backups directory does not exist. If it does, remove it.
• As user root, enter ln –sf /var/had/files/backups backups (must match the path set when adding a secondary hard drive.
• Verify ownership of /var/had/pba/backupsItalic text (symbolic link) is set to apache:apache.
• Ensure settings in /etc/fstabItalic text for the secondary drive include uid=48,gid=48 (see note).
• Reboot and attempt a LAN backup. The full backup files should now be saved to the secondary hard drive.

NOTE: This sets ownership of the drive/directories to user apache and group apache. To verify the correct uid and gid, enter id apache. It will display the applicable uid and gid. Permissions must be set as such for the PBA backups to be directed to the secondary hard drive. This is how my secondary drive is configured in /etc/fstabItalic text.

Added by diskmounter utility
/dev/sdb1 /var/hda/files vfat rw,user,uid=48,gid=48,fmask=0111,dmask=0000 0 0 

Periodic File Backups

<imagemap> Image:VistaBackups3.png|150px|Vista Backups default VistaBackups desc bottom-left </imagemap>

One of the ways to backup systems in your network is to use the operating-system provided backup service.

We have documented ways to do periodic backups in various platforms. If you have good suggestions on how to do that, please add them to this section of the wiki! (Or email it to us if you're wiki-shy)

Note: To new users only the "Bare Metal" Backups will show in the Amahi Personal Backup webpage all others will not show on this page.

Vista Backups

Here is a quick how to on doing periodic file backups in Windows Vista to your HDA.

Windows XP Backups

For XP Backups, visit the section for Windows XP

Ubuntu Backups

How to on backups using Ubuntu's Simple Backup.

Mac OS X Backups with Time Machine

WARNING - Hack ahead!

There is an unsupported way to enable using Mac OS X Time Machine to backup to your HDA. The hack is in this page and it's a one liner command to be typed in a terminal in Mac OS X:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

This will offer you the choice to backup to your HDA shares.

It should be noted that mounting a directory from your HDA via NFS let's you use time machine without this hack.

Needless to say, we're not advocating you backup your data like this, since Apple does not support this functionality. There are rumors that data corruption can occur if the size of the backup exceeds 2TB or if a large number of files, on the order of a million, are backed up. Because the exact conditions leading to data corruption are not well quantified, we do not recommend you backup like this.