Steps I took to get a backuppc server on an ubuntu 8.10 pc in order to be able to back up a windows vista business pc. I've only documented the non-obvious and undocumented items here.

• Added a user called backup to the vista pc.
• Added the backup user to the "administrators" group. I tried the "backup operators" group but it didn't give access to the user profiles. It looks like robocopy has some black magic that allows it to bypass ACLs when a member of backup operators.
• Enabled admin shares (ie \\machine\C$) by adding DWORD registry key LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System and setting the value to 1. See How to access Administrative Shares on Vista (C$) by PaulSpoerry
• Removed the -N from the SmbClientFullCmd etc options in backuppc's transfer (xfer) settings as it didn't seem to be using the provided password. Troubleshooting was aided by running /usr/share/backuppc/bin/BackupPC_dump -v -f vistamachine directly as user backuppc.
• Hide the backup user from the welcome screen by adding DWORD HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList\backup with value 0 to the registry. "backup" is the name of the user to hide, 0 means hide, 1 means show.

Enjoy.

See also:

• ubuntu backuppc/vista guide

Current status: This has only been partially successful so far. The backup runs but has lots of files missing due access denied errors on many of the important folders. It looks like I will have to manually give "backup operators" permissions to these folders. Sigh. Vista is proving to be less than easy for me to support.