matt's blog

Recently I had occasion to migrate my backuppc pool and config to a new machine, from a 32bit machine to 64bit

because I didn't have the foresight or read the docs my pool was not on it's own partition, for the most part eliminating my ability to do a block level copy of the data pool..

in the end this is how it went:

1. backuppc is installed on both machines; stop the service on both!

2. copy /etc/backuppc to new machine

3. using rsync, migrate the pool:
new machine: cd /var/lib/backuppc && rsync -vrlptgoDH oldmachine:/var/lib/backuppc/ ./
this takes a long time, for me around 15 hours on a 25gig pool. my old machine was quite underpowered though, and the raid was even degraded!
there were some errors but it worked well enough.

once that's done, start the backuppc service on the new machine and it should be running smooth (connect to web interface with password of old machine, kept in /etc/backuppc we copied earlier)

If you are changing architectures as I did, you may find the graphs on the web interface do not render, and apache2 spits out the following in error.log

"ERROR: This RRD was created on another architecture"

for this you need to get back into the old machine:
cd /var/lib/backuppc/log && rrdtool dump pool.rrd >pool.rrd.xml
send the resulting xml file to the new machine in the same dir
and on the new machine:
mv pool.rrd pool.rrd.old && rrdtool restore pool.rrd.xml pool.rrd
graphs should render now!

I should note the version of backuppc I'm running provides a script for creating an archive just for the purpose of copying, but I found it was most likely I didn't have the extra space to have a second copy of the pool floating around; next time I'd probly try this after pruning my pool quite a bit.

these threads/articles were quite helpful:
http://www.mail-archive.com/backuppc-users@lists.sourceforge.net/msg0576...
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/faq/BackupPC.html#other_installation_topics
http://n2.nabble.com/How-do-I-move-my-rrds-to-my-new-MRTG-system-td10750...