Using rsync, browse a host. Scroll down to Xfer Error Summary, and click on the relevant XferLOG. For me, using rsync, this file contains a list of all directories (changed or unchanged, so not really transferred) and all files (changed only).

It would be nice if it didn’t list directories, but that’s somewhat useful. Do your tar XferLOG files have that?

I agree, it would be useful to have a list of changed files.

My two pet annoyances with BackupPC are firstly, that it has a tendency to give strange tar errors (they don’t match the exact error the command line gives for the same tar command over SSH) making initial backups sometimes hard to setup. Secondly, I cannot find a facility in BackupPC for showing the full list of files that was backed up in a particular session. Browsing the backups tends to ‘fill’ from the last full backup (as I have mine set to do this) and so isn’t very useful for auditing.

Still, with a little bit of blind faith that ‘no error email = successful backups’, BackupPC has been much nicer. I will probably shift as my underlying storage environment becomes more heterogeneous (I am starting to use tapes more) as managing different storage pools in Bacula seems easier.

I agree that RAID is not disaster recovery. Cloning your BackupPC pool offsite does meet that need for me, though.

I’m not sure what you mean by “‘materializing’ a backup to a full filesystem”. But if you mean a bare-metal restore, use BackupPC_tarCreate and pipe it to ssh + tar. That is plenty fast enough for the times I’ve needed it.

I personally do multiple levels of backup. I use snapshoting of virtual machines and backupPC of physical for immediate recovery and then archive the whole set onto a tape library, and this is where bacula is really good at. It does manage my volumes very nicely and even makes use of the barcode feature of the tape library. I was using a proprietary solution for the last 5 years and was getting tired of its limitations. If I eventually end up virtualizing the remaining 2% of our 50+ servers I might end up discontinuing BackupPC but not Bacula.

As for BackupPC, the dedup feature is very nice, but “materializing” a backup to a full filesystem is somewhat I/O intensive. It reals gets my 6TB RAID array to its knees, but its really fast for recovering “that” file that someone deleted by mistake.

As for filesystems, ext3 isn’t all that bad, except for when the pool is being purged of old files during the night. I achieved best results with JFS, XFS and (recently) ext4. I might try BtrFS in the future, but it seems it still has a long way to go before it’s stable enough for the thrashing BackupPC is going to do to it.

One more hint though: Stay away from LVM2 on the server running BackupPC! If something does go wrong with the harddisk in the RAID on top of logical volumes, it really serves to ruin your last chance of rescuing any data at all.

If I had it to do over again, I would probably use a different filesystem. But ext3 has worked so far with our cpool and the server has no issues with the other stuff it does (syslog collection and analysis, plus the backuppc web interface).