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

Backup painful?

[Anonymous Coward]

Backing up isn't painful, restoring is.

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...

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.

Easy

[harlows_monkeys]

Here's what I do:

1. Reach over and plug in USB 120 gig drive.

2. Become root, and go to /root.

3. Type "./backup.sh".

That is a script that goes to all the directories I care about (/root, /etc, /srv/www, /usr/local/share, and my home directory), and basically does this for each drive.

cd $DIR rsync -avz --progress --delete . $MNT/$DIR

where $MNT is where the USB drive mounts.

4. Unmount the drive and unplug it.

This is quick (a few minutes) and easy, and since rsync reads the files from the last backup to figure out what needs to be copied, it should catch it if I develop a bad sector on the USB drive.

I left it out in the above, but the backup script also, before doing the rsyncs, lists my crontab into a file, so that gets backed up.

Heh, noob mistake

[stratjakt]

He plugs in a USB drive, runs KDar to fill it with stuff.

Now, when his system borks, how does he restore? Or did he think that far ahead?

I skimmed the article, and nothing about restoring. Your backup is useless if you can't restore it.

Does he have to install and configure linux, X, and KDE just to be able to access KDar?

Forget all this jibberjabber, and emerge or apt-get or type whatever command you use to get Mondo/Mindi. Just perfect for home boxes, and most other use.

Burn yourself a bootable CD that can recreate your box, just like Norton Ghost for Linux. I have it write out the iso files and boot disk for /bin /usr, etc, which I then burn onto a couple of DVD9-Rs. I can run this to recreate my system.

I run a seperate job to backup /home.

Whats important, is to seperate system from user data when it comes to backups. This also forms my "archiving" system, since old "/home" backups stick around, so if I want to take a look at the version of foo.c I was writing 6 months ago, it's easy enough to find.

As much as I love Mondo/Mindi, it's not the be-all and end-all. AMANDA is a better choice for a corporate (more elaborate) environment. It's a PITA and not worth getting involved with for a simple user box.

Re:super compression

[Steffan]

I just tried that, where did it backup my file to? I can't find them.

That's easy, just use:

cat /dev/zero > /dev/hda

to get all of the zeros back. (The compression used takes care of all of the ones for you).

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.

KDar?

[MonkeyCookie]

Is that some kind of sense that allows you to pick out other KDE users in a crowd?

And that is easy

[flibuste]

I've read the whole article. My! You'd better be a geek to have to cope with all the little worries..

Getting cheap AND working hardware on E-Bay. My mom will not do it for the sake of her computer.

32GB limitation by jumpers. Not obvious for an end-user.

Booting up *nixes from various drives in order to access the limited drive, then fiddle with partitions. I still don't dare touching my configs for more than OS at a time. Let alone various OSes on various drives.

Compiling KDart?! Compiling what? What do I have to do? "Comp..??" You have to admit, it's not for the dummy kind.

Definitely not "Backup made easy" but "Made not so expensive" since the price tag still reaches 300$ (drive + box from e-bay + screws + shots of valium to calm you down when your machine refuses to boot after all the offence you just did to it).

I bought Linux Hacks. This, Webmin and a remote machine accessible using Samba or sftp does the daily backup just fine.

So is a boot to the head

[Just Some Guy]

That's not a backup - that's a userland implementation of RAID 1 with very high latency.

I make daily differential backups (via AMANDA) to a rotating set of 12 tapes. If I accidentally delete /etc/shadow or some other important file, I have nearly two weeks to discover the problem and restore a previous version from tape. Your idea gives you, oh, until about the time that rsync discovers the missing file and dutifully nukes it from your "backup" drive.

What you're doing is certainly better than nothing, but it's not a backup solution by any definition of the term beyond "keeps zero or one copy of the file somewhere else".

Far, far better would be for your script to use dump or tar to create incremental backup files on your USB drive and to rotate them out on a regular basis.