Re: [BackupPC-users] wakeup command?

[Holger P. <wb...@pa...>]

Hi,

gregrwm wrote on 2011-07-07 17:40:33 -0500 [Re: [BackupPC-users] wakeup command?]:
> > > On 6/23/2011 3:59 PM, gregrwm wrote:
> > > > is there a command that triggers the equivalent of a wakeup? normally i
> > > > only want 1 wakeup per day, yet for special circumstances i often find
> > > > myself editing in a wakeup a couple minutes hence and triggering a reload.
> [...]
> generally i want backups to run at one specific time only, but i want
> specifically requested backups to be allowed anytime.

just for the record, backups requested via the web interface should be started
immediately, independent of WakeupSchedule, IncrPeriod or FullPeriod
(they may be delayed subject to MaxBackups and MaxUserBackups, though).
That's the whole point of manually initiated backups. There may be reasons to
change the client configuration and want an automatic backup to be run, though
the only one I can think of right now would be to test the configuration, and
even that doesn't seem to be that much different from running a manual backup.
Perhaps you should just run a manual backup?

> On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 21:15, Holger Parplies <wb...@pa...> wrote:
> [...]
> >    BackupPC_serverMesg backup all

Actually, the web interface uses a very similar invocation of
BackupPC_serverMesg to start a manual backup. If you don't want to go through
the web interface, you could use that variant from the command line:

	BackupPC_serverMesg backup <hostip> <host> <user> <type>

where <host> is the host name you assigned within BackupPC (usually the name
of the host), <hostip> is its DNS name or IP (in fact, automatic backups use
the same value as <host> here; not sure why you can specify something
different with BackupPC_serverMesg and how that interacts with
ClientNameAlias, for example), <user> is the name of the user requesting the
backup (though I don't think it's used for anything except logging) and <type>
is 1 for full, 0 for incremental or -1 for whatever is due, though you can
apparently also use the values doFull, doIncr, auto, autoIncr or autoFull (if
you have "at least" BackupPC 3.2.0, that is). So, to request a full backup of
a host named 'foobar', you'd normally use

	BackupPC_serverMesg backup foobar foobar me 1

Of course, if all your hosts simply missed their backups for some reason, the
'backup all' variant is simpler, though if this happens often, you should
probably consider adding a second wakeup, as I outlined previously. For
reference, I use

	$Conf {WakeupSchedule} = [2, 22, 23, 0];
	$Conf {IncrPeriod} = 0.8;
	$Conf {FullPeriod} = 6.8;

That way, BackupPC_nightly is run at 2:00, backups are normally run at 22:00,
but are retried at 23:00, 0:00 and 2:00 if necessary. Even if a backup turns
out to be run at 2:00, the next one should again be run at 22:00 (because more
than 0.8 days will have passed). Don't ask me why I left out 1:00 - probably
to avoid collisions between BackupPC_nighly and my longest backup.

Regards,
Holger