[Fedora] semi-OT: easy backup solution for FC5

[Les Mikesell]

Ashley M. Kirchner wrote:
>> Hi - I'm wondering if there is something in the Fedora/Linux world 
>> comparable to the Windows-only Maxtor OneTouch external HD - i.e. a 
>> more or less idiot-proof automatic (incremental) backup system.  Time 
>> is tight right now, but I'm getting really paranoid not having my 
>> ~100GB Fedora machine backed up.  Any recommendations?
>> Thanks much -
>>
>    Well, not exactly like the OneTouch solution, but I can tell you what 
> I do to backup 15 servers every night.  I have 1 dedicated machine 
> that's the backup server.  It has a large RAID 5 setup in it for data 
> storage.  All of the servers will run rsync every night and backup their 
> data to the backup machine.  I use a system of hardlinks between backups 
> which allows the snapshots to take little space (compared to the actual 
> one) and it allows me to keep anywhere between 2 to 6 weeks worth of 
> data that way.

Backuppc (http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/) will do all of this 
automatically, also compressing the files and finding duplicates across 
machines and hardlinking to save additional space - and it has a nice 
web interface for management and browsing backups.

By the way, a backuppc wiki is being started at 
http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net/.


But, for a single machine you might just use an exteral USB drive (or 
rotate a couple) with a script that rsync's each filesystem to it.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com