198|192|7||1674305321|7|1674495988|0|Due to the technological revolution that we are currently living, we wanted to make a brief review of one of the most famous tools, although not considered by many among the most prominent, this tool is known as BackupPC, and this time we want to talk in detail about what we consider most important of this software created to facilitate the life of users when making backups. It is certainly an interesting tool that deserves its own mention in this blog, so we will try to show its most important features and give an objective opinion about this tool. For more than a decade BackupPc has been climbing positions in the software markets worldwide, so much so that in 2007 it was ranked as one of the 3 most popular open source backup software in the industry, that is why today we wanted to give a brief opinion about the tool, and somehow mention certain features that from our perspective are the most striking of this software, we will try to be as descriptive as possible with the approach of this tool and we will focus only on the aspects that we consider most important. To begin this publication, let us define BackupPC.

What is BackupPC?

BackupPC is a free disk-to-disk backup software with a web interface. This cross-platform software can run on any Linux, Solaris or Unix-based server system, and does not require the use of clients, since the system is a client itself enabled to carry out multiple protocols that are handled by other native operating system services. In 2007, BackupPC was named among the 3 most popular open source backup software worldwide, however, after belonging to this prestigious list it had to know the other side of the coin, to the point of being rarely remembered by the community, despite being one of the most efficient tools offered by the market today. From our perspective, we want to highlight that despite not being the most influential tool today, it has managed to maintain an excellent service and satisfy the need of its subscribers, which is not always easy to do, it is obvious that it is not possible to satisfy 100% of the community or subscribers who purchase a product, however BackupPC has managed to endure over time on its own merit, thanks to the high performance system that offers to perform backups and the ease with which the system can be configured and installed. The most updated version of BackupPC is 4.4.0, which was released on June 20, 2020, without a doubt the features that this software presents are worth mentioning, so let's talk about some of them.

Some of the most important features of BackupPC

- One of its main features that we should mention, is that through the web interface it manages we can view log files and configuration, besides allowing users to start and cancel backups or browse and restore files from backups. - Data deduplication of identical files in several backups from the same or different PCs are stored only once, which saves considerable disk storage space and disk I/O. - In the compression process only new (ungrouped) files have to be compressed, which causes only a modest impact on CPU time. - It is distributed under a GPL license, as well as being hosted on Github, which allows it to be open source software. - BackupPC is written in Perl and extracts backup data over SMB using Samba , tar over ssh/rsh/nfs or rsync.

Important benefits of BackupPC

- It is integrable with different protocols, which is truly striking within this tool, it is easily integrated with: NFS, SSH, SMB and rsync and can back up Unix-like systems with native support for ssh and tar or rsync, as well as Linux, BSD, and Mac OSX, in turn Microsoft Windows shares with minimal configuration. - Another point in favor of backupPC that we can mention is how robust its system is, how well documented its web page is and how reliable the system is for its users, besides being offered for free as open source. Needless to say that if you need to go deeper into a specific topic about this tool, you can enter their website and look at all the online documentation they offer, or you can also subscribe to any of the emails they provide to users to stay in touch with the community, they have different options, so it is advisable to first learn about the issues mentioned in each mailing list and subscribe only to the lists that the user is interested in participating.

BackupPC uses a combination of hard linking and compression to save disk space. This is done in the following way, in the first full backup all files are sent to the server, optionally compressed and then compared. Files that are identical are hard linked, which only uses one additional directory entry, resulting in a system administrator being able to back up 10 Windows XP laptops with 10 GB of data each, and if 8 GB were to be repeated on each machine (Office and Windows binary files) it would seem necessary to use 100 GB, however only 28 GB (10 GB x + 8 GB) would actually be used by the system. Later in the back-end data compression will reduce this requirement even further. When examining the different backups, the new incremental backups are integrated with the previous full backup, which enables the process for each backup to be a full and complete copy of the user's data.

In conclusion

Efficient tools to carry out a backup process, there is a great variety of them in the market, and not only that, but new alternatives are constantly emerging, which makes it even more difficult for the user to choose one of them to carry out this process, however the competition that exists today to offer and hire the best product to perform a backup service, Therefore it is necessary to say that it is not bad to try new alternatives, but if we do not want to run major risks when entrusting such an important task, it is better to use a software that has remained in the first places since many years ago and to avoid major complications.