Carl, Thanks for this.
I can see that it wasn't the best idea to mix installation methods. I was reading through the backuppc v4 online documentation and I thought it implied that v4 was available at the debian package link. Unfortunately that wasn't the case. I have no idea how to go about making a package, but it's definitely worth looking into for future upgrades. If I set up a clean install on a new system, how easy would it be to migrate the existing pool to that? Thanks for all your help! Phil. -----Original Message----- From: Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 17 March 2017 16:00 To: General list for user discussion, questions and support <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [BackupPC-users] version 4 upgrade On 03/17 11:58 , Philip Parsons (Velindre - Medical Physics) wrote: > I had an installation of backuppc v3.3 (I think) and installed via apt-get on > debian. <snip> > I saw on the backuppc site that v4.0 was available, but it didn't appear in > the package lists. So I downloaded the tarball and upgraded from that. Using > configure.pl. It's pretty universally a bad idea to mix installations of software by packages and tarballs. If you install something one way, stick with that. As someone who has to maintain a non-trivial number of systems, I would *really* encourage you to always use packages instead of tarballs - even if you have to wait for a while for someone to make a package (or make a package yourself - it's actually not that hard). The problem is that packages and tarballs (as you've noticed) don't always (perhaps not even 'often') install to the same locations. So init scripts and other tools often have problems finding the correct locations for any given file. Also, when it comes time to remove or upgrade the software, tarballs don't give you an option to do that easily. Nor do they allow you to revert out the software installation easily. If you try to remove a package after having clobbered some of the files in it with a tarball, you're likely to get package manager errors (files not found, etc) and possibly be stuck with them until you do some serious tinkering with your package database. I would really recommend that you try out BackupPC 4.0 on a fresh OS install. Put it on a test box, put it on a virtual machine (ideally a VM which would allow you to roll back to a previous snapshot if things go badly wrong). Try it out and see if it does what you want. Then, ideally, set up a new production box in parallel with the old one and start backing up hosts to the new machine in parallel with the old one. Then shut down the old one. Now that you have your situation tho.. it's not hopeless, but you will learn a lot before you have it all working again. Look at it as a learning experience. :) -- Carl Soderstrom Systems Administrator Real-Time Enterprises www.real-time.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
