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Network-based Encrypted Backup in 15 Minutes
Amanda writes "Many of us plan for mundane (but important) tasks like setting up backup during long weekends. Much of it is because of complexity and cumbersome nature of the tasks involved. This article shows how to quickly and securely set up a network-based backup, all using freely downloadable software tools like Amanda, Samba and Tar."
My favorite secure backup solution is rdiff-backup. It compiles and runs under window, linux or osx...
All traffic is sent over ssh...
It took 2 days to do first backup of my music collection...but subsequent runs only take 3-4 mins now (we are talking over 100 gigs)
Another nice feature of rdiff-backup is that it uses diff's to store changes to files...so you have a current 'mirrored' copy of data...and then you can pull up old versions using its diff features....
Of course it's a single command line tool...perfect for cron scripting, ect...
Another testitment to its speed - I use it to backup some linux virtual servers home directories...it can complete about 300+ servers in 15-25 mins....joy!
Enjoy! I know I have! =)
Backups-to-disk are becoming much more popular, I suppose because disks are now so much cheaper than tapes, last longer (IMHO) and are much more reliable. I had a lot of trouble at a previous employer with backups to tape - mostly in the fact that I could *never* do a restore, because tapes would just lose stuff.
So I wrote dbackup (shameless plug for an open-source system here) to be an extremely simple way to backup multiple filesystems on multiple servers to a central archive (in my case on a NetApp filer), which then did it's own tape archive thing which never worked.
It's a couple of perl scripts, it's really really simple, and it takes minutes to set up.
http://dparrish.com/dbackup/
Anything is possible, except skiing through revolving doors.