Re: Recommendation sought how to maintain off-site backups/mirrors

Hi there,

On Sat, 18 Jul 2026, martin f krafft wrote:

> I nearly lost my BackupPC machine the other day and it made me realise 
> that I have no backups of my backups.

Just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. :)

> Hence, I would like to set up a mirroring of the BackupPC (v4) pool to a 
> remote store, client-side encrypted.
> ...
> I wish BackupPC just kept track of files it created and deleted and then 
> I could asynchronously follow that file and copy/remote-delete away ...

Be careful what you wish for.  Adding complexity isn't necessarily
going to make things more reliable.  Anything that involves following
a trail of breadcrumbs is likely to break next time it meets a duck.

You might be able to create the list you desire from the rsync logs:

$ BackupPC_zcat XferLOG.2206.z | grep ' recv '
     same   recv .f..t...... rw-r-----     1005,    1005         0 BackupPC/LOCK
     same   recv .d..t...... rwxr-xr-x     1001,    1001     36864 ged
     new    recv >f.st...... rw-------     1001,    1001       850 ged/.lesshst
     new    recv >f+++++++++ rw-r--r--     1001,    1001    853310 ged/20260716_170622.jpg
     new    recv >f+++++++++ rw-r--r--     1001,    1001   1392333 ged/backuppc-xs-0.63.cmake.2026.07.16.tar.gz
     same   recv .d..t...... rwx------     1001,    1001      4096 ged/.emacs.d/auto-save-list
     same   recv .d..t...... rwxr-xr-x     1001,    1001      4096 ged/.local/share
     new    recv >f.st...... rw-------     1001,    1001     27285 ged/.local/share/recently-used.xbel
     same   recv .d..t...... rwx------     1001,    1001      4096 ged/.local/share/gvfs-metadata
     new    recv >f..t...... rw-------     1001,    1001    539640 ged/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/.nfs00000000007813f900003c4b
     new    recv >f+++++++++ rw-------     1001,    1001    540120 ged/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/.nfs00000000007813fd00000330
     new    recv >f.st...... rw-------     1001,    1001    540324 ged/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/home
     new    recv hf+++++++++ rw-------     1001,    1001    540324 ged/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/.nfs00000000007813ff00000332 => ged/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/home
...
...

As you can see not a lot gets deleted around here. :(  You might need
to tweak some configuration to get the log output needed.

> Hence, the way to do things would be to just send over the new files 
> along with their refs, and ignore everything else. And then to run a 
> prune every now and then and delete files that are no longer in 
> existence.
> 
> Is there a tool that is optimised for this task?

Does this sound like a BackupPC configured to do only incrementals?

> What do you use to mirror your BackupPC pool to an off-site location?

I don't do it that way.  I maintain multiple completely separate backups
so that a single point of failure can destroy only one of them.  Some of
the really important stuff is copied to a couple of USB sticks hidden in
a drawer at home, together with a hand-written note about what it is (in
case I'm dead and somebody else finds it :).

-- 

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/