This page describes how bcollect is used. It does not describe who uses bcollect, so if you're looking for that you will be disappointed with the contents of this page.

The configuration file

bcollect is controlled through the configuration file /etc/bcollect.conf which contains settings of all backups as well as general settings. An example of a typical configuration file would look like this:

Begin Defaults
        Interval "daily" 10
End Defaults

# Define a backup
Begin Backup
        Name            "penrose"
        Source          "85.214.21.174:/"
        Destination     "/home/backup/penrose"
        Summary         true
        Exclude         "/proc/*"
        Exclude         "/usr/pkg/emul/linux/proc/*"
        Exclude         "/emul/linux/proc/*"
        Exclude         "/kern/*"
        Exclude         "/tmp/*"
        Exclude         "/mnt/*"
        PreExec         "echo Before backup | logger"
        PostExec        "echo Before backup | logger"
End Backup

# Define another backup
Begin Backup
        Name            "thebsh"
        Source          "193.219.115.146:/"
        Destination     "/home/backup/thebsh"
        Summary         true
        Exclude         "/proc/*"
        Exclude         "/usr/pkg/emul/linux/proc/*"
        Exclude         "/emul/linux/proc/*"
        Exclude         "/kern/*"
        Exclude         "/tmp/*"
        Exclude         "/mnt/*"
        PreExec         "echo Before backup | logger"
        PostExec        "echo Before backup | logger"
        # This backup is not executed on bcollect -a
        ManualOnly      true
End Backup

The Defaults section may currently contain only intervals for backups. These intervals always follow the scheme:

Interval name number-of-copies-to-keep

The section Backup may be repeated as many times as required. Each of the instances describes a backup to be configured. Various options may be set here:

• Name: the name of the backup, used for invoking bcollect
• Source: rsync compatible hname for a source of the backup, such as hostname:/path or rsync://hostname/share.
• Destination: path in the local file system where the backup shall be stored, such as /var/adm/backups/hostname.
• Summary: flag (true or false) which indicates if rsync shall show a summary or not.
• FromCcollect: flag (true or false) which indicates whether an existent backup from ccollect shall be considered in hardlinking and removing old backups.
• ManualOnly: flag (true or false) which indicates whether the backup shall be run when bcollect is being invoked with the -a flag.
• Exclude: adds one directory per line to the list of directories to be excluded from the backup.
• PreExec: command to be executed before the backup is run.
• PostExec: command to be executed after the backup is run.

Invoking bcollect

bcollect accepts a small numbers of command line parameters. For a typical backup run, a command line such as

% bcollect daily -a

is sufficient. This will run all backups which have not been disabled explicitly (through the ManualOnly flag) and retain the number of backups specified in the interval daily. It should be noted that bcollect is aware of backups which are already being executed and refuses to start them again while another backup process is still running. Instead, an error message is produced:

% bcollect daily thebsh
thebsh: Backup already in progress
% 

When executing the backup, bcollect creates a directory named backupname-intevalname-yyyy-mm-dd_HHhSS in the target directory, e.g. thebsh-daily-2010-03-29_18h16. The backup is being stored into that directory.

bcollect accepts the following parameters:

% bcollect [-c configfile] [-p] |-a

Parameter	Effect
-c configfile	Use an alternative configuration file in place of /etc/bcollect.conf
-p	Ressource controlled parallel execution of multiple backups (not implemented yet)
-a	Execute all backups instead of expecting single backups as parameters
interval	The interval to be executed, indicating how many backups to keep around
backup	The name of the backup to be executed, typically the host name, as indicated in bcollect.conf as Name