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

Ralph A. Mack ralphmack at comcast.net
Wed Feb 15 11:33:45 EST 2012


Thanks folks,

As usual, one size does not fit all so thanks for the variety of answers. 

I'll use DejaDup for my laptop, as Stephen mentioned. I deliberately keep it from having a lot of system configuration to duplicate on my day-to-day systems. I should be able to rebuild it from a raw OS reinstall pretty trivially. So DejaDup will keep all my home areas and the contents of my data drive safe.

I'm liking this rdiff-backup arrangement for my DNS server. Thanks, Lloyd. There, everything is about system configuration and recovery looks like - switch everybody else's systems to do DNS from the router temporarily and get the bugger back up fast. 

I set up my DNS server so I can maintain static address allocations and systems can find each other by their assigned host name. Its an authoritative server for local addresses, behind the router, invisible to the external world. It points to the router to find outside addresses. (<grump>Why doesn't my router's DNS config support this feature?</grump>) Is there any reason I shouldn't make the NAS drive just get its DNS from the router rather than the DNS server everything else is using? It seems sensible not to make its operation dependent on any system whose data it stores. I think it's just using DNS to get to the time server and the site from which it finds out about updates. The router should be fine for that. Does a Samba server care about DNS naming for its clients? I didn't think so.

Ralph

On Feb 14, 2012, at 18:06, Lloyd Kvam wrote:

> 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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