rdiff-backup-ubuntu-portable

Brendan Kidwell
11 July 2016

This script will create a portable (user-installable) copy of Ubuntu's rdiff-backup package, good for shared hosting like DreamHost.

Usage

Do the following on a local Linux machine or on the remote machine where you eventually want to install rdiff-backup:

1. Copy mk-portable-rdiff-backup.sh to a temp folder such as ~/Temp/rdiff-backup.
2. Go to http://packages.ubuntu.com and download the .deb files for rdiff-backup and librsync1 for the Ubuntu distribution running on your target machine. (In the case of DreamHost, that would be the amd64 build of Ubuntu 12.04 "precise", at the time of this writing.)
3. Copy the two .deb files you downloaded into your working folder (~/Temp/rdiff-backup).
4. Run mk-portable-rdiff-backup.sh

You will get rdiff-backup_$VERSION_$ARCH.tar.gz.

Installation

Go to ~/bin (create it if necessary) on the target machine and extract the contents of the .tar.gz file created in the previous step.

Using the Portable rdiff-backup in Server Mode

If your target system is a shared web host like DreamHost, you probably don't have ~/bin in the $PATH environment variable for "non-interactive" shells. To use your remote rdiff-backup in "server" mode, you must specify the "remote-schema" command line option so that the client knows where to run the server script from.

For example, if you want to use rdiff-backup to login to HOST as FOO and backup the ~/BAR.com folder, use the following command line on the client:

rdiff-backup --remote-schema 'ssh -C %s bin/rdiff-backup --server' \
FOO@HOST::/home/FOO/BAR.com BAR.com

(Don't forget to install your client's SSH key on the server, and other details needed to make this work from an automated script, if needed.)