[sllug-members]: easy backups

[Scott Patten]

Jared Smith wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-05-01 at 16:34 -0600, Steve Dibb wrote:
>   
>> My situation is this: I have a large directory of all different kinds of 
>> files that I want to backup on a regular basis.  Some (*.txt) I want to 
>> backup daily.  Some, I want to backup weekly, and the rest monthly.
>>     
>
> Check out rsync, and especially rdiff-backup (which, as I recall, is
> based on the same rdiff algorithm as rsync).
>
> -Jared 
>
>   
I'd like to add a second vote for rdiff-backup.  It combines the 
advantages of diff with those of rsync.  It will very efficiently create 
a copy of a directory and also keep compressed backups of the changes 
that occurred  since the last backup.  When you want to restore a file, 
you just copy it.  When you want to restore an older copy then you issue 
an rdiff-backup command that decompresses and recombines the files to 
give you the version that you are after.

There are essentially three kinds of backups that I do.  The first is 
for disaster recovery.  The second is for archival purposes.  The third 
is for those files that get deleted or changed somehow but suddenly I 
want them back.  Rdiff-backup is perfect for this third case since it's 
extremely fast, reliable and easy.  It's also great for doing my mail 
server backup since I can take my system off line and perform the backup 
very quickly.  If I want to do an archive style backup then I can do 
that later at my leisure.  It's not terribly space efficient but space 
is cheap.

There's an RPM available for the RedHat variants.  There's also an 
Gentoo ebuild.  I recently tried to compile the SRPM for OpenSuse and 
got bogged down looking for rsynclib-devel.  To save time I just mounted 
a remote Samba share and performed the operation "locally".  This is 
what I do to backup files on Windows systems also.


Good luck,

Scott