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

[Lloyd Kvam]

On Tue, 2012-02-14 at 15:16 -0500, Ralph A. Mack wrote:
> Backup for me is a practical necessity rather than a life project, so
> I want something that just works, errs on the side of caution, doesn't
> require continuing attention and maintenance, etc.

I use rdiff-backup.  The current files are in place on the backup along
with a change history (rdiff's).  You'll need to resort to the
rdiff-backup command line if you want to use the rdiff history to get an
ancient version, however the current version can simply be copied.

This is what I use to backup my laptop:

# ionice -c 3 means idle -- do io when system is otherwise idle

ionice -c 3 rdiff-backup --exclude-other-filesystems
--exclude-special-files --exclude=**/tmp
--exclude=**/var/tmp / /media/backup/venix-laptop

My backup drive is mounted locally, but rdiff-backup will use ssh to
backup over your network connection.  Change /media/backup to something
like root at backup-server:/backup-dir

I've convinced myself that ionice actually speeds up the backup by
avoiding conflicts accessing the drive.  I did not make any careful
measurements to back that up.

-- 
Lloyd Kvam
Venix Corp
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