Backups are an integral part of any operating system. They ensure that critical copies of data are always available in case a system crashes or something goes wrong.
Urbackup is an efficient and easy-to-use client-server backup system for Linux and Windows systems. It is a fast and reliable Linux backup tool with a web interface that allows you to add clients whose files and directories need to be backed up.
Urbackup uses deduplication to store backups on Windows or Linux servers. Backups are created invisibly, without interrupting other running processes on the system. Once backed up, files can be restored via the web interface, and disk volumes can be restored using a bootable USB drive.
In this guide, we will show you how to install Urbackup and perform a backup on Ubuntu based distributions.
Setting up the test environment
To illustrate Urbackup in action, we will have two nodes, as you can see below.
- Urbackup server (Ubuntu 20.04) with IP address 192.168.2.104
- Client system (Linux Mint 20.03) with IP address 192.168.2.105
Installing Urbackup Server on Ubuntu 20.04
Step 1. Install Urbackup on the server.
So, login to the server and update the repositories.
$ sudo apt update
Next, install the following dependencies, which will be required during the installation.
$ sudo apt install curl gnupg2 software-properties-common -y
The default urbackup server is not provided in the Ubuntu repositories. So we are going to install it from the PPA provided by the developer.
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:uroni/urbackup
After adding the PPA to the system, update the repositories again and install the urbackup server.
$ sudo apt update $ sudo apt install urbackup-server -y
Along the way, you will need to specify the path where your backups will be saved. The default path will be /media/BACKUP/urbackup. This works great and you can also provide your own path. In this case, we will go to the default path, press the TAB key and press ENTER.
Once installed, the Urbackup service starts automatically. You can confirm this launch by running the following command.
$ sudo systemctl status urbackupsrv
The output above shows that the service is up and running. You can also enable it to run on system startup as follows.
$ sudo systemctl enable urbackupsrv
The Urbackup server is listening on ports 55414 and 55413. You can confirm this with the ss commands:
$ ss -antpl | grep 55414 $ ss -antpl | grep 55413
You can now access the Urbackup web interface by viewing your server's IP address.
Step 2: Create an admin user on the Urbackup server
Urbackup installed successfully, but is available to everyone as no authentication is required. In this step, we will create an admin user for authentication.
In the web interface, click "Settings" -> "Create User".
Provide a username and password and click "Create" to add a user.
After that, the user will be listed on the toolbar as shown in the figure.
Step 3: Add a New Backup Client to Urbackup
After successfully installing the UrBackup server, the next item on the list is adding a client whose files and directories will be backed up on the server.
To do this, click the "Add a new client" button.
On the page that appears, click "Add New Internet/Active Client" and enter your preferred name for the client. Then enter the IP address of the client system and click Add Client.
The command to be executed on the remote client's system will be displayed as shown.
TF=`mktemp` & wget " -O $TF & sudo sh $TF; rm -f $TF
So, go to the client system and run the command. In this case, we are running the command on the Linux Mint system, which is our client system.
Running the command starts the Urbackup client service. You can check its status as shown.
$ sudo systemctl status urbackupclientbackend
Step 4: Set up client backups on Urbackup
The next step is to set up a backup. On the client system, we will create a backup of the home directory by running the following command. Feel free to provide your own preferred directory.
# /usr/local/bin/urbackupclientctl add-backupdir -x -f -d /home
Now go back to your Urbackup server and you will notice that the client system is listed as online. Now you can start the backup manually, otherwise the backup will run according to the default schedule.
Shortly thereafter, you will receive an "OK" status indicating that the backup is complete.
To confirm that the backup has been created, go to the Actions tab and you will see detailed information about the backup.
In addition, you can click "Backups" to view detailed information about the file backup.
In this tutorial, we installed and configured Urbackup on Ubuntu-based distributions and installed the client service on the client computer whose home directory we backed up.