BaclupPC - how to backup to a separate HDD

[ibates]

I have installed BackupPC through the Synaptic system. It installs well on Ubuntu 10.04 and looks as though it is just what I have been looking for.

But; although I am by no means a dummy user, I cannot for the life of me understand the vast majority of what is written in the documentation. I would say it requires a high degree of expertise to understand what it is saying.

My problem is simple. I need to back up to an independent HDD. One that has no OS, and is simply a data disk. In my case, it is /dev/sde.

How can I configure BackupPC to do this?

[ibates]

It appears you can't do this - period.

[howwhi]

May I humbly disagree with the above conclusion that one may _not_ put backuppc on a separate HDD?

I agree completely that an environment variable to point to the file location would be very nice. Might be a suggestion you could post on the backuppc forum on sourceforge.

In the mean time, know that the major data files for backuppc are stored in the directory "/var/lib/backuppc." As root, I did the following:
service backuppc stop
cd /var/lib
mv backuppc backuppc_mv
cp -av backuppc_mv /backup/backuppc # a separate volume
ln -s backuppc /backup/backuppc
service backuppc start

Hope this helps

Howard