Backing Up is Hard to Do?

Joe Barr writes "NewsForge is running a story this morning on a personal hardware/software backup solution for your Linux desktop (NewsForge is owned by Slashdot's parent OSTG). The solution doesn't require a SCSI controller, or tape drive, or the ability to grok a scripting language or archiving tool to work, either. It's based on point-and-click free software. Plus it includes a dead-parrot joke by Linus Torvalds."

Comments

My choice for backups:

[Megaslow]

I use rsnapshot to automate my backups to another host. Works like a dream, providing multiple virtual point in time copies (just like similar functionality from Network Appliance, etc.).

Rsync or mkzftree for backups

[ceswiedler]

The best way to create differential backups under Unix is with hardlinked snapshots. Easy Automated Snapshot-Style Backups with Rsync has a good explanation of how to do this. The best part is that restoring is as simple as copying a file. Each snapshot is a folder hierarchy on disk, and you can browse through any snapshot and find files you want.

One small improvement over rsync (IMO) is to use mkzftree from the zisofs-tools package. It's designed to create compressed ISO filesystems which will be transparently uncompressed when mounted under Linux (and other supporting operating systems; it's a documented ISO extension). mkzftree supports an option for creating hardlinked forest (like cp -al and rsync), with the advantage that the files are compressed, thus saving space. ISO isn't quite as flexible as ext2 for things like hardlinks, so what I do is have DVD-sized disk images formatted as ext2 to store the snapshots. I burn the disk images directly to DVD; each one can hold ten or twenty compressed snapshots (of my data anyway). The disadvantage is that I can't read the files directly (because they're compressed, and the transparent decompression only works with ISO) but it's easy to decompress a file or folder to /tmp using mkzftree if I need to restore something.

It shouldn't be hard to make the transparent decompression code work with other filesystems than ISO, as long as they're mounted read-only. The files are just gzipped with a header block indicating they are compressed.

My solution: backuppc

[vlad_petric]

It's the Swiss Army knife of backing up. It can backup stuff over samba, ssh/rsync, ssh/rsyncd, ssh/tar, direct file access (in other words it doesn't need special software installed on the clients). It keeps a single copy of multiple, identical files, so backing up a bunch of Windoze machines can be done with decent amount of space.

Restore is also straightforward - it can be done in place, or by downloading a zip/tar file.

Re:Backup painful?

[khrtt]

Here's my solution

Backup:
tar -czf backup.tar.gz /home /etc
Then use k3b or something to record the file to CD

Restore:
Take a wild guess:-)

Restore individual files:
Use mc to browse the tarball (slow but works)

Now, do you see me bragging about this trivial shit on slashdot? No?

Eh, wait...

RSync makes backup easy...

[grumbel]

In case you have a seperate computer or a seperate drive one can use rsync to relativly easily create backups, its just a few lines of Shell:

rsync -e ssh \
--delete \
--relative \
--archive \
--verbose \
--compress \
--recursive \
--exclude-from list_of_files_you_don't_wanna_backup \
--backup \
--backup-dir=/backup/`date -I` \ /your_directory_to_backup \
user@other_host:/backup/current/

This command mirrors everything in /your_directory_to_backup to user@other_host:/backup/current/ and in addition to that keeps all the changes you did to that directory in a seperate 'dated' directory like /backup/2005-01-15, so you can also recover files that you deleted some days ago. Some other posters seem to have missed the '--backup' option, which is why I repost the rsync trick.

Disadvantage is that you can't easily restore an exact old state of the directory which you backuped, however you can retrieve all the files very easily.

There are also floating some shell scripts around which add to the above rsync line some vodoo to hardlink the different dated directories, so that you have a normal browsable copy of each and every day while only wasting the space for the changes.

And there are also tools which optimize this whole thing a bit more, by compressing the changes you did to files, like http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/

However overall I found the plain rsync solution the most pratical, since it doesn't require special tools to access the repo and 'just works' the way I need it.