[sllug-members]: Backup solutions

[Mac Newbold]

Yesterday at 2:32pm, Donald Livingston said:

> My company is in the process of setting up an Asterisk VoIP PBX system for
> our office phones, and we are in need of a backup solution for the Asterisk
> box.  We would like to be able to create an image of the hard drive for
> quick recovery.  We looked into Symantec Ghost, but it appears to install
> only to Windows partitions.  I am looking for a similar software solution
> that will run on RHES 4. If we can't find a reasonable solution by the end
> of this week we will look at alternatives (backup scripts to external
> drives, DVD burner, etc.).


The UofU CS Department (okay, School of Computing) has a research project 
that produced an open-source disk imaging tool. One of the coolest things 
about it was its Ghost-like (but much faster and much more scalable) 
multicast installation tools, but it works great on single boxes too. I 
haven't tried it lately, but I remember at one point someone saying he 
booted from a CD to dump an image, but I don't know what it does now. 
They primarily use it for image-once, install-many operations rather than 
backups of a live system, so it might not fit what you need. But if it's 
just a single emergency-recovery image you need, it might be a good 
candidate. It's called Frisbee and is available from www.emulab.net on the 
software page.

If you end up going with something other than whole-disk images (if it's 
for daily backups, etc, I'd highly recommend avoiding whole-disk images) 
then I've been really happy with rsnapshot. In a nutshell, it uses rsync 
and hard links to keep a set of snapshots (i.e. hourly, daily, weekly, 
monthly, etc to your tastes) that are each a full backup of your system, 
but with only the disk space use of one full backup plus incrementals at 
the times you've selected. It's been great for us, and it gracefully 
handles changes to the file system while it's running (complains when 
files disappear, but still works great), as well as times when it can't 
successfully finish the rsync, where it rolls the snapshot back to the 
last complete one. If you've ever used a NetApp, it does pretty much the 
same thing as their .snapshot voodoo magic.

If you want a more traditional backup solution, I've heard many good 
things about bacula, and it would have been my next choice if rsnapshot 
hadn't have worked. It's author came and presented at a GUBUG meeting last 
year, too, and it seems extremely robust, flexible, and powerful.

Thanks,
Mac

--
Mac Newbold		MNE - Mac Newbold Enterprises, LLC
mac at macnewbold.com	http://www.macnewbold.com/