Backup recommendations

[Ian Chapman]

Max Pyziur wrote:

> I have a home network with a server (used as the DSL router, gateway) 
> where I have some spare disks to which I copy/ftp/smbclient stuff from 
> the various home machines.
> 
> I suspect that with the amount of digital content I'm accumulating, 
> though, that there are better/improved ways and would be interested in 
> reading others' recommendations and practices.  Or even recommended links.

Well personally I find rsync an excellent tool for backups. I have a 
server with about 550GB of storage which I use to backup my machines 
using rsync. I do a 100% backup of every machine. The nicest feature is 
that rsync will only backup anything that's changed since the last 
backup run.

On a client machine (assuming linux) I have something similar to the 
following in /etc/rsyncd.conf

---------------

motd file = /etc/rsyncd.motd
log file = /var/log/rsyncd.log
pid file = /var/run/rsyncd.pid

dont compress   = *.gz *.tgz *.zip *.z *.rpm *.deb *.iso *.bz2 *.tbz 
*.lha *.lzx *.rar *.img *.dms *.cab *.mp3
hosts allow     = 192.168.1.2

[root]
comment         = "The entire filing system"
path            = /
list            = true
read only       = true
uid             = root
gid             = root
exclude         = /dev/shm/* /media/* /mnt/* /proc/* /tmp/* /sys/*

-------------

I have the rsync service enabled (/etc/xinetd.d/rsync), which contains:

------------

service rsync
{
         disable = no
         socket_type     = stream
         wait            = no
         user            = root
         server          = /usr/bin/rsync
         server_args     = --daemon
         log_on_failure  += USERID
}

------------


Then on the server when I do a backup I use the following (from a script)

rsync -av --delete --ignore-errors rsync://<machinename>/root 
/backup/<backupdir>


You can of course adapt/script things to your own needs, but this works 
very well for me and it's used to backup Linux, Solaris, MacOS X and 
Windows machines.


-- 
Ian Chapman.