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Nobody wants to do backups – but everyone wants to have a backup handy after something went wrong.
Therefore the best backup solution is one that doesn’t require any user interaction.

The following does NOT make a system backup ! But what it does without any user interaction about once a day is to backup my data.

The following has been made on a machine running Ubuntu 8.04.

1. apt-get install backuppc
   this installs BackupPC 3.0 and a lot of other dependent packages. In case Apache isn’t installed you’ll get asked which version you prefer. My Answer was “Apache 2″.
2. Now BackupPCshould be available under http://localhost/backuppc
   The password that’s required to login has been displayed during the installation process. To change the password open a terminal and type
   
   sudo htpasswd /etc/backuppc/htpasswd backuppc
3. By default BackupPC does backups of /etc
   Select the host “localhost” and goto “edit config” and section “Xfer”
   Add as many “TarShareNames” as you like. But at least /home
4. To give backuppc full access privileges we need to run the backup process as root. Change the “TarClientCmd” to
   /usr/bin/env LC_ALL=C /usr/bin/sudo $tarPath -c -v -f – -C $shareName –totals
   Save the changes
5. To allow backuppc to use the tar command as root  edit the file /etc/sudoers
   sudo nano /etc/sudoers
   and add the line
   backuppc ALL=NOPASSWD: /bin/tar
6. Now you can start your first backup manually to see that everything works. Subsequent backups will be done automatically once the last backup is older than 0.97 days.

Having a backup for the last 7 days is nice but doesn’t help anything on a defect harddisk. So please store the backup on a additional harddisk ! BackupPC writes it’s data to /var/lib/backuppc where I’ve mounted my backup harddisk.