SOHO Backups?

[Jason Stephenson]

Lawrence Tilly wrote:
> What about the software side of the discussion.  Assuming a basic
> backup strategy around either CD-R or DVD-R, what are your favorite
> tools for scheduling and handling nightly ( incremental ) backups and
> periodic full?

I've seen scripts for doing incremental backups to CD-R. If you try 
searching the FreeBSD.org mailing lists for cdrecord or some such, 
you'll find some that have been posted there.

Personally, I just make snapshot backups periodically. I burn to CD-RW 
generally, so I blank the disc and replace it's contents.

[Snip]

> For myself I am very happy and comfortable w/ command-line solutions. 
> However, an intuitive GUI would help my significant other participate
> as well.  At the same time, I would prefer if it could be kicked off
> via cron.  Maybe something that's configured and can run restores via
> GUI but executed via cron?  Maybe I'm asking too much?  :-)

I have a script that I wrote that basically just runs mkisofs with the 
options to create an ISO. It makes a directory structure using the 
graft-points option. I also include Rock Ridge and Joliet extensions. It 
gathers up the directories I want and ignores a couple. Whenever I need 
to change the directories that I'm backing up, I just modify the script. 
This is rather rare, though, because I have a pretty well-defined 
directory structure on my workstation. I mainly just backup my home, a 
cvs repository, and a /home/root where I keep copies of the 
configuration files from all my home servers.

I run cdrecord manually from the command line, but the cdrecord step 
could easily be added to the script.

I find it's very easy to fire up rxvt, su to root, run my script, and 
then type in the cdrecord options.

I haven't put any of this in cron, but I'm sure it would work from 
there. I only make a backup once every week or two, or if I've been 
making heavy modifications to some of my projects.

As for restores, I've copied data from my backups a couple of times that 
I remember. All I do for restore in my situation is cp -Rp or some such. 
There's a complicated trick that you can do with cpio that's faster, but 
I can never remember the proper command line switches. ;)

I have heard that you can burn a tar file raw to a CD-R and then treat 
it like a tape. I've never gotten that to work, so I assume this is an 
urban legend.

At my "day job," we use DAT for backup, but we have gigs and gigs to 
back up there. At home, I just have about 350 MB of stuff that I 
regularly backup, so CD-RW works pretty well for me.

I have a few CD-Rs hanging around of particularly dated snapshots. I 
made them when I thought I was doing something that might cause me to 
lose files that I might later want to retrieve. They're on a variety of 
media, and so far I've been able to read them all, and some are now 
four+ years old. Granted, I don't look at these very often, but I did go 
through them all this past August just to see what I had on them.

HTH,
Jason