[aklug] Fwd: Re: Backups

From: Jeremy Austin <jhaustin@gmail.com>
Date: Wed Apr 29 2009 - 16:44:09 AKDT

Jeremy Austin
IT Administrator
Whitestone, Alaska

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jeremy Austin <jhaustin@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 3:37 PM
Subject: Re: [aklug] Re: Backups
To: "Joshua J. Kugler" <joshua@eeinternet.com>

On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 1:14 PM, Joshua J. Kugler <joshua@eeinternet.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday 29 April 2009, Christopher Howard said something like:
>> Just thinking about my backups... I currently have a fairly simply
>> backup system with rsync copying the data to my backup server as part
>> of a nightly cron job.
>>
>> Do any of you guys do anything more complicated, like diff or
>> incremental backups? The downside of my current method is that I can
>> only pull backups from the night before (rather than, say, get a
>> backup from three days ago). I was pondering some kind of weekly full
>> backup + daily incremental backup scheme, but not quite sure how to
>> do that.
>

Rsync with hard links is fairly useful, with something like this:
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

If bandwidth is a constraint between your source & backup (perhaps an
offsite backup?) then my favorite method is rdiff-backup:

http://wiki.rdiff-backup.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

It doesn't use hardlinks, but it does store compressed reverse deltas.
You can easily restore a backup from three days ago, if you keep daily
backups. I usually keep 40 days of daily backups, plus a 'recycle
bin'. Your current backup is stored uncompressed, so in an emergency
it just requires a straight copy.

For more complex systems, something like Bacula or BackupPC or Amanda
or... the list goes on... would be more appropriate.

> You can have rsync do hardlinks for unchanged files on the remote side,
> but this relies on having a directory structure on the remote side that
> has one directory for each day, or having a script on the remote side
> which moves directories around. (This could be done by an SSH call
> before the rsync).

Jermudgeon
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Received on Wed Apr 29 17:07:08 2009

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