backup thoughts..

[Steven Stern]

On 01/09/2014 10:16 AM, Richard Shaw wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 8:30 AM, bruce <badouglas at gmail.com
> <mailto:badouglas at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     hi.
> 
>     looking to be able to backup a number of machines running fed (and
>     possibly other linux flavors)
> 
>     I'm considering some sort of agent process, where the owner/user can
>     define the dirs that the owner wants backed up. This kind of approach
>     would allow us to be able to track when things get backed up, as well
>     as what's getting backed up.
> 
>     The downside of this, we don't want to backup all of the OS tree, but
>     at the same time, if a dev has created apps that toss stuff into the
>     "OS" tree, it might not get backed up, unless specified...
> 
> 
> I use BackuPC at home. It's clientless (uses the rsync on the host) but
> it's designed to be very automated. You can't tell it exactly when to
> backup, just a time window. You can specify how many full and
> incrementals you want to keep, what directories you want to
> include/exclude, and even do a tar (with or without compression)
> archives out to another disk/location. It is NOT designed for full
> system backup/restores and because of the dependence on rsync, it
> doesn't handle large files that change frequently as it has to transfer
> the whole file again. It does do deduplication so it's generally
> effective for home directories, especially where there is a large number
> of duplicate files between users. 
> 
> Richard
> 
> 


As long as we're recommending:  I use rdiff_backup to back up my home
directory every morning to the server in the basement.  Once a week, I
use rsync to back up the whole thing to an external USB3 drive via this
script. Because it uses hard links when copying backup.x to backup.x+1,
there's no additonal space needed for files that have not changed, so I
can easily have weeks of backup on the external drive.

#! /bin/sh
mount -t ext4 /dev/sdb1 /mnt/ext-backup
echo last backup was `ls -l /last_backup_ts |cut -d ' ' -f 6-8`
cd /mnt/ext-backup/sds-desk
echo deleting oldest backup
rm -fr backup.F
echo rolling backups
mv backup.E backup.F
mv backup.D backup.E
mv backup.C backup.D
mv backup.B backup.C
mv backup.A backup.B
mv backup.9 backup.A
mv backup.8 backup.9
mv backup.7 backup.8
mv backup.6 backup.7
mv backup.5 backup.6
mv backup.4 backup.5
mv backup.3 backup.4
mv backup.2 backup.3
mv backup.1 backup.2
echo copying backup to backup.1
cp -al backup backup.1
echo updating backup
rsync -va --exclude-from /usr/local/bin/do-backup-excludes --delete /
/mnt/ext-backup/sds-desk/backup/
cd /
df /mnt/ext-backup
echo Wait for external drive to settle
sync
sync
sleep 30
umount /mnt/ext-backup
echo USB drive ejected
touch /last_backup_ts

-- 
-- Steve