I'm looking for a clean way to backup my laptop in part so before I apply any updates I have a clean backup to revert to if needed.
I have a / and /home filesystems in order to backup before I run a set of updates from yum I suspect I need to backup / separately this way I dont need to restore my 22Gig of documents in /home if an update breaks something.
In the past I've gone onto single user mode and used dd to backup my HD
I wonder if running tar with the proper flags to ensure the following would be as effective 1) restrict tar to the current(/) filesystem (i.e. disallow it from going off into /home) 2) ensure that tat picks up all the dot files
2 questions: 1) is the above tar scenario sufficient to protect me from yum update changes? 2) anyone have suggestions per specific tar commands that will do the operations specified above?
Thanks in advance
On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 12:53 PM, Kevin Kempter kevin@kevinkempterllc.com wrote:
I'm looking for a clean way to backup my laptop in part so before I apply any updates I have a clean backup to revert to if needed.
I have a / and /home filesystems in order to backup before I run a set of updates from yum I suspect I need to backup / separately this way I dont need to restore my 22Gig of documents in /home if an update breaks something.
In the past I've gone onto single user mode and used dd to backup my HD
I wonder if running tar with the proper flags to ensure the following would be as effective
- restrict tar to the current(/) filesystem (i.e. disallow it from going
off into /home)
- ensure that tat picks up all the dot files
2 questions:
- is the above tar scenario sufficient to protect me from yum update
changes?
- anyone have suggestions per specific tar commands that will do the
operations specified above?
I wouldn't use dd for backups unless you wanted to restore an exact bit-by-bit image of an entire filesystem.
I've found rsync to be very effective, with the important advantage that you can run the backup several times and it will only copy what changed between one copy and the next. The rsync man page gives several examples of this. You might also be interested in rsnapshot, which basically wraps crontab scripts around rsync and can keep multiple time-related snapshots without wasting disk space.
poc
On 12/22/2008 04:28 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
I wouldn't use dd for backups unless you wanted to restore an exact bit-by-bit image of an entire filesystem.
I've found rsync to be very effective, with the important advantage that you can run the backup several times and it will only copy what changed between one copy and the next. The rsync man page gives several examples of this. You might also be interested in rsnapshot, which basically wraps crontab scripts around rsync and can keep multiple time-related snapshots without wasting disk space.
poc
I backup our system at work (500GB) using rsync. Our New York office runs rsync against my backup volume. Over the years I have found rsync to be a very reliable tool.
Jerry Feldman wrote:
I backup our system at work (500GB) using rsync. Our New York office runs rsync against my backup volume. Over the years I have found rsync to be a very reliable tool.
I just got BackupPC to work on my system, after hours of torture. (Is this the worst documented Linux application?) Effectively, BackupPC is a GUI front-end to rsync. Once set up it seems quite impressive to me.
Kevin Kempter-2 wrote:
I'm looking for a clean way to backup my laptop in part so before I apply any updates I have a clean backup to revert to if needed.
I have a / and /home filesystems in order to backup before I run a set of updates from yum I suspect I need to backup / separately this way I dont need to restore my 22Gig of documents in /home if an update breaks something.
I have used a script for some years which is based on rsync. I will attach the file and you can adapt it to your needs if you like it. Note that this sends the backup to a usb drive that is attached to the machine. it is relatively straightforward to adapt it to work across a LAN or also across the internet to push or pull updates to/from remote machines. http://www.nabble.com/file/p21150306/backall%257E backall%7E
Sorry the previous file was an old one - this is the correct script http://www.nabble.com/file/p21150355/backall backall
On Tue, 2008-12-23 at 11:54 -0800, Mike Cloaked wrote:
Sorry the previous file was an old one - this is the correct script http://www.nabble.com/file/p21150355/backall backall
So your script backsup what is in the list= line?
On Tue, 2008-12-23 at 13:52 +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
Jerry Feldman wrote:
I backup our system at work (500GB) using rsync. Our New York office runs rsync against my backup volume. Over the years I have found rsync to be a very reliable tool.
I just got BackupPC to work on my system, after hours of torture. (Is this the worst documented Linux application?) Effectively, BackupPC is a GUI front-end to rsync. Once set up it seems quite impressive to me.
-- Timothy Murphy e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
Timothy,
Every time I get the chance to get into BackupPC I run out of time trying to get a satisfactory starting point. I agree with you about the documentation. Have you uncovered a good tutorial for it?
Greg Ennis
Gregory P. Ennis wrote:
I backup our system at work (500GB) using rsync. Our New York office runs rsync against my backup volume. Over the years I have found rsync to be a very reliable tool.
I just got BackupPC to work on my system, after hours of torture. (Is this the worst documented Linux application?) Effectively, BackupPC is a GUI front-end to rsync. Once set up it seems quite impressive to me.
Every time I get the chance to get into BackupPC I run out of time trying to get a satisfactory starting point. I agree with you about the documentation. Have you uncovered a good tutorial for it?
No, I looked at 3 tutorials: http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/BackupPC http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_backuppc http://linuxwave.blogspot.com/2008/08/installing-backuppc-in-centos-5.html But I didn't think any of them was very good; I just put together bits from each of them.
In my case, the main problem seemed to be in setting up SSH, exchanging keys between backuppc on the server and root on the client.
However, I'm not sure I got everything right; I was quite surprized when it started working perfectly!
On Wed, 2008-12-24 at 01:01 +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
Gregory P. Ennis wrote:
I backup our system at work (500GB) using rsync. Our New York office runs rsync against my backup volume. Over the years I have found rsync to be a very reliable tool.
I just got BackupPC to work on my system, after hours of torture. (Is this the worst documented Linux application?) Effectively, BackupPC is a GUI front-end to rsync. Once set up it seems quite impressive to me.
Every time I get the chance to get into BackupPC I run out of time trying to get a satisfactory starting point. I agree with you about the documentation. Have you uncovered a good tutorial for it?
No, I looked at 3 tutorials: http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/BackupPC http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_backuppc http://linuxwave.blogspot.com/2008/08/installing-backuppc-in-centos-5.html But I didn't think any of them was very good; I just put together bits from each of them.
In my case, the main problem seemed to be in setting up SSH, exchanging keys between backuppc on the server and root on the client.
However, I'm not sure I got everything right; I was quite surprized when it started working perfectly!
Timothy,
Thanks for the links. I understand ssh and have used it for a long time with perl scripts to create tar files from remote PC's. However, I have not made it past the configuration of BackupPC..... thanks again for the links !!!!
Greg
Mike Chambers-7 wrote:
So your script backsup what is in the list= line?
The list line contains the directories that you want backing up - these are the items in the loop - so it does an rsync for each of the items in the list line..... you can add/change/remove to suit your system.
Mike Chambers-7 wrote:
So your script backsup what is in the list= line?
By the way I should have mentioned that this presumes that you have set up ssh between the machines for root using ssh keys so that no passwords are needed. It also presumes you are allowing root ssh login on the machine that you connect to that takes the backups. Note also that the -X flag on the rsync command will copy across the security contexts of files and directories - if you are not running SElinux enabled then that flag is not needed.
Not also that it is set up to remove files on the backup area where they no longer exist in the machine being backed up.
Additionally it is worth mentioning that first time round this takes a while as all files have to be copied, but in the future only files that have changed get copied across - hence this is a very quick incremental backup and the receiving disk has essentially an exact match to the directories being backed up. If you have two backup disks then you can alternate them for each successive backup so that if there were some problem during the backup process you would still have to previous copy.
This system also means that recovering files or directories and their contents is very easy by simply doing a reverse rsync to copy back files that you want - and it is also very simple to find files on the backup area using the "find" command.
Having this script located on the sbin area of each machine where you want to run a backup is easy to do and each machine can be configured separately by altering the script. I can usually run a backup from around 5 machines in about a quarter of an hour once the system is set up.
-
Gregory P. Ennis -
Jerry Feldman -
Kevin Kempter -
Mike Chambers -
mike cloaked -
Patrick O'Callaghan -
Timothy Murphy