[BackupPC-users] Debian packaging

[Kenneth P. <sh...@se...>]

I'm migrating from CentOS (an RHEL clone) to Debian. I moved my external 
BackupPC drive to it (mounted at /var/lib/BackupPC) and copied the 
/etc/BackupPC directory over. (I actually keep that directory on the root 
of the external drive and mount it when the rest of the drive is mounted, 
so the config stays with the drive.)

The first issue I ran into was needing to rename the BackupPC directories 
to backuppc, all lowercase. A couple of symlinks took care of that.

I then chowned all the directories to backuppc:www-data. Doing that for the 
external drive took over a day. There's got to be a better way for Linux to 
handle removable media with millions of files. I'd read that bindfs can 
change the effective owner of a drive but it's a FUSE filesystem so there's 
a performance cost.

The trickiest bit was that BackupPC was ignoring my per-host configs in 
/etc/BackupPC/pc. Digging into the code, I found that Text.pm had been 
patched (by the Debian packager?) to not look there. It disables useFHS and 
then removes the line to fall back to looking in the pc subdirectory. Why?

Now I have my backups working again.