I've used BackupPC for a few years now, and I've found that it's a very good backup tool. The first installation I did was for Snota and it is still running just fine on it's Ubuntu machine. Installing it on Ubuntu was a breeze. It's clear that it's package maintainer Ludovic Drolez is doing a good job packaging it.
Yesterday I installed BackupPC on my home network. The lucky machine is running Gentoo. Gentoo's Portage repository is currently only stocking the rather old-ish 2.1.2 version from 2005. A lot has happened since (including support for multi level incrementals), and I decided to update the ebuild script to install the latest version (3.1.0). This was not as straight forward as I had hoped.
The included configure.pl script from BackupPC does not only configure paths, but it goes ahead and installs the files all the same. Not exactly what I'd expect from a script called configure. It should be splitted into a configure and an install script.
BackupPC has a facination with using "BackupPC" with capital letters in it's install paths, and I prefer not using them in install paths, as does the Debian and Ubuntu team. It's more standard that way. It is rather difficult to convince BackupPC that I prefer to use lower case letters, since it did not find the config.pl-file when I put it in /etc/backuppc instead of /etc/BackupPC. I actually had to patch Lib.pm so it would find it. It took me a while to find out why BackupPC didn't want to start, the error messages weren't exactly trying to tell me that it couldn't find config.pl.
Now it's running fine, and happily taking backups of my files. This is a great backup program once it is installed properly!
