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

Jerry Feldman gaf at blu.org
Wed Feb 15 07:36:12 EST 2012


On 02/14/2012 05:55 PM, Ralph A. Mack wrote:
>
> 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?
>
>
I use rsnapshot at home and at work. While it is essentially a perl
script around rsync, it generally works well. Duplicate files are hard
linked. So that you can keep as many backups as you want. Each backup is
essentially an incremental backup, but the resulting directory is full.
If you pick up a corrupted file, it may be corrupted in one or more of
the backups, but not in some of the older ones. At work, we also get
backed up by our New York office who uses rsync. What I really like
about rsnapshot is that recovery is easy. Recently I was unable to do an
upgrade install to Fedora 16, so I simply rebuilt from scratch and
simply copied all my files back to my home directory, and I also back up
/etc for some configurational stuff.

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id:3BC1EB90 
PGP Key fingerprint: 49E2 C52A FC5A A31F 8D66  C0AF 7CEA 30FC 3BC1 EB90


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