How To Install Latest Version of rdiff-backup in Fedora Core 6 and Earlier

Fedora Core 6 an earlier do not have the latest version of rdiff-backup - version 1.2.2. The latest version of rdiff-backup is incompatible with the earlier versions. So our backup server running the latest version of rdiff-backup, for example, couldn’t backup files from server running older version of rdiff-backup that comes with Fedora Core 6 or before.

You can get the latest version from the development repository but that will entail a full upgrade of several hundreds of files and who knows what inconsistency it will introduce in your production system. A much safer alternative to upgrading the whole system is to just upgrade rdiff-backup on older versions of Fedora Core OS and other Linux OS  is explained in detail below:

First install librsync-devel using the command below:

yum -y –enablerepo=extras install librsync-devel

Now dowload the latest version of rdiff-backup from their website. They provide it as tar file for Linux platforms. I downloaded version 1.2.2.

Untar it to a directory and after cd’ing to that directory, run as root (or with sudo):

python setup.py install

This will install the latest version of rdiff-backup on your system.

You can check the verssion by typing:

rdiff-backup –version