Docs & FAQ Pages Download SysBackup SysBackup on SourceForge SysBackup on GitHub SysBackup on Ohloh Installation Overview System Requirements Basic Installation SSH Remote Storage First Run Be Prepared!

Requirements

PHP was chosen for this project because it has become the most popular scripting language in the world. Unfortunately, even though the LAMP stack has become wildly popular on the internet, PHP is not installed by default on many servers and workstations. Begin by checking your system to verify that you have PHP v5.1 (or higher) installed:

$ php -v
PHP 5.1.6 (cli) (built: Nov 29 2010 16:47:46) 
Copyright (c) 1997-2006 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.1.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2006 Zend Technologies

Modern Linux distros very often ship PHP in dozens of small packages. At the very least you will want to make sure that you have installed the command line version of PHP. The package names differ from installation to installation:

• For Debian/Ubuntu-derived distros look for the php5-cli package.
• For Redhat-derived distros look for the php-cli and php-process packages.

If you forget to install the php-process package on Fedora 15 you will get a

PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function posix_geteuid() in lib/general-sysutils.inc

Again, sudo yum install php-process will solve this problem.

Notes:

• SysBackup is a simple PHP script. In principal you do not need root permissions to run it. You can use SysBackup to easily produce backups of files in your system account. It follows, however, that you will need root access to backup other user accounts, the root folder and other system-related bits and pieces of a full server or workstation.
• Most of the various configuration files are themselves PHP scripts. If you are not familiar with PHP please take the time to find out a bit about PHP. The manual is available at http://www.php.net/manual/.

If you plan to use the SSH Remote feature to write backups to a remote server you will need to make sure you have SSH properly installed on your system. Most Linux distros install OpenSSH by default but not all. If you are using a Debian derived distro (ie: Ubuntu) and find that the OpenSSH server is not installed you can install the openssh-server package. For detailed information follow the instructions here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SSH