Slbackup a great wrapper for rdiff-backup

Slbackup is a framework for
rdiff-backup to make it easy to set up a backup solution. The clients
and the host storing the backups can either be the localhost or an
external host reachable via a SSH connection (using SSH keys). There is
also a Webmin module.

To install it on a deb-based-system:

apt-get install slbackup

The configuration file can be found here:

/etc/slbackup/slbackup.conf

There is an default configuration available and I will do a litle explaining about the config file. Default:

<client>
<localhost>
location /etc
location /home
location /var/backups
keep 185
user root
address localhost
type local
</localhost>
</client>
server_user root
server_destdir /var/lib/slbackup
server_type local
server_address localhost

A few words off explaining about the config file. It’s xml based,
you can add multiple clients to the config file. Explanation of the
example config:

Client options:

• <client></client>: between this tag all the clients must be entered;
• <localhost></localhost>: definition of the
  workstation/server to backup, localhost can be changed to what ever the
  name of the workstation/server is.
• location: The dir you want to backup
• keep: the number of days you want to keep the backup UPDATE: Use 0 if you do not want any old backups to be deleted
• user: the user you would like to use to perform the backup with
• address: if type is local you use localhost other wise use the ip or the dns of the workstation/server to backup
  • • type: is either local or remote

Server options:

• server_user: The user localy used to perform the backup actions with
• server_destdir: Where the overall backup for is lcoated
• server_type: if the server is local or remote
• server_address: if type is local you use localhost other wise use
  the ip or the dns of the workstation/server to store the backup

The is in short explained how you can use the config file. There are also other option that can be used:

• exclude: is to exclude a folder you don’t want to backup for instance /home/music
• exclude_regexp: can be used to exclude all files with an extension like an iso for example: *.iso

Note:

• If you put remote as type you have to install rdiff-backup on the remote system too.
• Run it as an day to day task you add it to your crontab :
  # cron job for Skolelinux Backup (once A day)
00 01 * * * root if [ -x /usr/share/slbackup/slbackup-cron -a -f
/etc/slbackup/slbackup.conf ]; then /usr/share/slbackup/slbackup-cron;
fi