Backup systems?

Lloyd Kvam python at venix.com
Wed Oct 20 19:54:12 EDT 2010


On Wed, 2010-10-20 at 17:51 -0400, Joshua Judson Rosen wrote:
> Cole Tuininga <colet at code-energy.com> writes:
> >
> > On 10/20/2010 01:31 PM, Tyson Sawyer wrote:
> > > I've been using backup-pc with good results.  I started making my own
> > > rsync scripts and decided that I had better things to do and backup-pc
> > > had already done a better job than I ever would.
> > 
> > Seconded.  I've been using rsnapshot for backups for quite some time,
> > but backuppc (once set up) has a lot more options to simplify
> > restoration, etc.  I've been working on switching over to it myself.
> 
> I've been thinking of moving to rsnapshot myself (from my own
> mostly-equivalent script), but now I see that, according to Debian's
> statistics, it looks like rdiff-backup is about twice as popular:
> 
>     http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=rdiff-backup
> 
>     http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=rsnapshot
> 
> 
> Is there a reason for that?

rdiff-backup keeps difference deltas on the files.  It also preserves
hard-links.  This is handy for dealing with files where deltas are not
very useful.  

I backup those (non-delta) files - typically web sites where lots of
files are replaced -  with dirvish.  I believe that's now a dead
project, but has been working for me.  dirvish creates date named
directories (e.g. 2010-10-19) with unchanged files hard-linked across
the proper range of date directories.  (I assume rsnapshot uses a
similar hard-link approach.)

I use rdiff-backup to handle the dirvish directories and everything
else.  rdiff-backup is not locked into a daily schedule like dirvish,
but simply creates new deltas each time it runs.

So long as you want the most recent version of a file, you can simply
copy it out of the backup directory tree.  Restoring to a point in the
past requires using the rdiff-backup command-line interface to specify
the desired point in time for restoration.

Then use tapes or external drives to capture the rdiff-backup directory
tree and store them off-site.  There is no incremental tape backup.  You
have the full history on every tape.

You can efficiently layer rdiff-backup over rsnapshot, but probably not
the reverse.

-- 
Lloyd Kvam
Venix Corp
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