2 years later... backups

[Paul Wouters]

On Thu, 6 Jul 2006, Peter Gordon wrote:

> On Thu, 6 Jul 2006 09:54:54 -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> > So what is the status of doing base/incremental backups for FC5/6?
>
> I rather like rsync. I use it to backup my /home, /var/www, and /etc to
> a spare hard disk every couple of days. :)

Nothing beats rsync over ssh in combination with "cp -l"

Twenty lines of shell script gives me 30 live live and full backups
per host:dir combination, with only about 2.4 times the storage per tree.
Without the annoyance of partial/incremental trees. We smb export them
readonly, and all users can click their way back for 30 days to help
themselves restore files.

In essence:

for i in `cat /etc/backup.list | egrep -v "^#"`
[...]
rsync --bwlimit=512 --numeric-ids --compress  \
 --rsh=/usr/bin/ssh -t --recursive --archive       --relative --sparse \
 --one-file-system --delete --exclude-from=/etc/backup.exclude \
 $HOSTNAME:$DIRECTORY /vol/backup/$HOSTNAME/Current
echo "Creating hardlinked copy in /vol/backup/$HOSTNAME/$DATE"
cp -al /vol/backup/$HOSTNAME/Current/$DIRECTORY /vol/backup/$HOSTNAME/$DATE/$DIRECTORYBASE

This means, cp will use links whenver possible, so it only stores double
copies of files when the actually change, and most of your system doesn't.
Though if you do this, be aware of large files that grow daily, since
rsync will recreate those locally every day. Think of forgotten apache
server logs of 1GB. We rotate those logs into daily logfiles, so we
don't have that problem.

Paul
-- 
Building and integrating Virtual Private Networks with Openswan:
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