No-brainer backup from Linux to space on remote drive?

[Ralph A. Mack]

Thanks, all,

I looked through the suggestions. Remote backup turned out to be something different than what I had in mind. BackupPc is expected to sit on a centralized server and so, it would seem, is rsnapshot, or at least rsnapshot is using Linux file system properties to optimize storage.

I try to run my domestic LAN on a self-service basis so I don't have to come home from a day of programming to be the domestic systems admin, i.e. the bottleneck. I'm providing a NAS drive with private areas for the individuals in the house. My notion is that they can use any backup tool they like locally on their systems to push their data onto the provided NAS area. As long as the NAS drive doesn't become inaccessible, it doesn't become my problem. :) Of course, if they ask, I can suggest tools they might want to learn about and use. This is very different from an office, where its somebody's job to do this stuff.

So they've got three Windows machines between them to worry about. I've got a handful of boxes including two or three running Linux. For each Linux box, I'm just looking for a daemon that runs as a service that does periodic incremental backups of user data and system configuration behind the scenes, pushing the bits to a NAS drive and using the NAS storage area to keep track of where it is in the backup cycle. If it saves enough so I can reconstruct the system more or less as it was if the hard drive crashes, I'm happy. 

If backup (or any act of maintenance) is something I need to remember to do, it will never happen. If it's something I can set up once and then forget about for a few years, that'll work. I know that's not the attitude of an IT professional, but home is where I come to leave my profession behind for a few hours and use my computers to make art and music and stories and write essays and plan the revolution :), using open source tools wherever I can.

Can I get rsnapshot to do the kind of thing I'm talking about without writing a lot of additional scripting, or is there a better tool for this kind of operation?

Ralph

On Feb 14, 2012, at 16:38, Alan Johnson wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 3:57 PM, Shawn O'Shea <shawn at eth0.net> wrote:
>  I've heard good things about BackupPC, but never personally tried it. It supports Linux/Win/OSX, and is designed for backing up to servers (your network drive in this case). It has a Web GUI.
> http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/info.html
> 
> 
> Use it at home and probably will at work soon.  Love it.  Does take a bit of configuring, but the GUI works you through it.  It uses hardlinks to de-duplicate any files that are identical (uses a hash database) so it can be pretty hard on inodes.  Best to mkfs with small files settings or use a file system that has infinite inodes.  I use reiserfs on my backup drive for this reason.  Is it XFS that also has no inode issues?  I stick with reiser because I don't want to piss him off.
> 
> Another trick I've learned is to make sure you have stable/static IPAs: manual-static code them in or DHCP-static code them by MAC address if your DHCP server allows (much nicer IMHO).  This only matters if you are using one of the transfer options that use SSH since it relies on key changes. I think there is a way to tell SSH/rsync to ignore key errors, but then you might mess up your clients.  I have not see a way to uniquely identify a server other than by name/IPA.
> 
> _______________
> Alan Johnson
> alan at datdec.com
> 
> 
> 

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