BackupPC Files

This is the first candidate for the next production release of BackupPC, which will be version 4.4.1.

After several years of inactivity BackupPC is now actively maintained by the new maintainer, @GWHAYWOOD.

The change in BackupPC version 4.4.1rc1 most likely to cause issues is that this and all later versions of BackupPC will require at least BackupPC-XS version 0.63 to be installed, rather than the older version 0.62. For security reasons version 0.63 no longer bundles zlib, which meant that the system must provide it. If you need to build BackupPC-XS (and as it is not yet packaged you probably will) you will need the tools to do that, including the zlib headers - most likely from your distributions libzlib-dev package or whatever your distribution calls it.

The change most obvious to a user will probably be the corrected handling of UTF-8 in the configuration editor of the browser-based user interface. In the example in Github issue [#426] for BackupPC, if the names of shares entered by the user in the include/exclude configuration sections contained characters encoded in UTF-8, they would be broken when rendered on a browser page refresh. It seems likely that UTF-8 encoded text entered into a browser in other parts of the interface may possibly have suffered the same fate. Note that it was always and remains possible to edit the configuration files with an ordinary text editor - many people, including Yours Truly, usually do it that way - and this would avoid any browser rendering issues.

There have been many other relatively minor fixes, see the closed issues and the Changelog which is a work in progress.

The most important improvements not yet included in this Release Candidate relate to the use of Samba's smbclient for accessing shares, predominantly on Windows machines, using the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. The interface between BackupPC and smbclient has always been prone to breakage when the Samba Team made changes, and some of the shortcomings of smbclient reflect badly on BackupPC. Ideally the development of BackupPC will at a minimum eliminate the fragility, but the direction of this work must at least in part depend on input from the Samba Team. Absent the unexpected appearance of more serious issues, that is where development will focus now. The plan is for Release Candidate 2 to include some progress in this area.