(easy) backups [SOLVED]

[Alan Johnson]

On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 11:29 AM, Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org> wrote:

> On 11/07/2009 10:21 AM, Alan Johnson wrote:
>
> > Because I'm too lazy to RTFM myself, does rsnapshot take care of
> > clearing out older data to make room for new, or does that need to be
> > handled separately?  I believe backkuppc takes care of that, if my
> > memory serves, but again, it was pretty complicated to get going.
> >
> Yes.
> It maintains 1 directory for each backup for instance:
>
...


> remember there are not 19 copies of each file, there is only 1 copy of
> each file that has not been changed. Also, when daily is run it first
> removes the oldest daily and renames daily.[0-5] to daily.[1-6], then
> renames the oldest hourly (hourly.6) to daily.0. So, the only actual
> rsyncs are done on the hourly. Also note that the dates on the monthlies
> are going to be over a month old because they are simply a renaming of
> the latest daily.
>

That's all very good, and typical of *nix systems (a la logrotate), but
IMHO, a perfect system would not throw away anything until there was not
enough space for the new.  As you add systems/data, you loose history, but
you can add storage when you want more history rather than when you are
worried about having enough room for the next backup.

I have an rsync-based script that I wrote long before I heard about
rsnapshot that first checks to make sure there is enough room on the store
by deleting oldest snapshots first before each iteration of a server-and-dir
loop, but it would be nice if the backup tool could manage that along the
way.


> Note that this has 19 links. I'm probably doing an overkill but I am a
> bit paranoid since I had a crash last year, and my backup was flawed. I
> also have a lot of excluded files such as Firefox caches.
>

Nah, this is the very reasoning I prefer the remove-only-when-low-on-space
system: if you have the space, keep the history. =)  You have at least the
latest snapshot off site too?  There are plenty of very cheap on-line
storage options out there.  Don't trust them with your data? (and you
shouldn't) Just mount a dir on their system with encfs!  Linux rocks!
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