Backups are one of those things that are kind of “out of sight, out of mind”. Since I implemented BackupPC on the home network I’ve kinda been lax about checking on it. I decided to take a peek last night and noticed that my laptop hadn’t been backing up since the first of November. That’s a little alarming.

I fired up the BackupPC interface and initiated a backup, then switched away and surfed a bit. I gave it a few minutes and checked again, and noticed that the backup had failed with a “Got fatal error during xfer (fileListReceive failed)” error.

I looked at the date again and noticed that was the day I upgraded the client being backed up to Edgy Eft. I did a little digging and found out that there’s an rsync option that needs to be added to the rsync profile to successfully backup Edgy boxes. Simply add the “–specials” option to the end of your rsync options in BackupPC’s config.pl file, and reload the config. Your Edgy boxes will now backup properly, with no loss of functionality on the non-Edgy clients.