Backup for server

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Fri, 2012-06-08 at 02:11 +0100, Andy Campbell wrote:
> > On Thu, 2012-06-07 at 13:11 +0300, Alan Holt wrote:
> >> My boss doesn't want it =( Don't know what to say.. He is a boss. So
> >> that's
> >> why I am looking for something else.
> >
> > Tell him you found this great utility called rsnapshot that does
> > everything he wants. Don't tell him it's a wrapper round rsync.
> >
> 
> On that topic, another great solution is rdiff-backup.
> http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/
> 
> Yes, this is based on rsync, but it has some very nice additions, so
> your boss might approve
> :: easy to deploy - available in the standard Fedora repo, no need for
> a server, just one standard package on each box
> :: backup remote servers with a 1 line command (assuming you have SSL
> key authentication configured)
> :: can easily run through SSL, for example, if you need to backup over
> the internet
> :: uses rsync as a transport, so it's pretty fast (it only sends
> changes over the network)
> :: wraps rsync to add extra features, including tracking of
> differentials on every backup
> :: so your backup filesystem will contain a complete mirror of what
> you backed up, not an archive.  This means you can easily login to the
> backup server and simply browse/copy files direct out of the last
> backup (no need to extract individual files, just browse, view, copy,
> directly), OR, you can roll a file back to previous dates, such as
> "restore this file to how it was 15 days ago"
> :: it works great

Actually rsnapshot does pretty much all of that as well, though details
are different. I use it over an NFS connection to my home NAS (an Iomega
box that I can't log into, but that's another story). Rsnapshot uses
hard link farms to keep snapshots of the entire backed-up volume, so
going back in time is easy with standard Linux commands. And it's also a
standard Fedora package.

There are some differences between the two (e.g. rdiff-backup actually
stores diffs, which rsnapshot doesn't do, but doesn't allow deletion of
intermediate snapshots, which rsnapshot does allow) but it's probably
six of one and half a dozen of the other for most people.

A comparison:
http://www.saltycrane.com/blog/2008/02/backup-on-linux-rsnapshot-vs-rdiff/ (somewhat old by now but the discussion is updated recently).

There's also a GUI for rsnapshot in the Fedora repos: backintime-gnome
or backintime-kde. I haven't tried it.

Cheers

poc