[K12OSN] low tech solution needed for backing up home directories

[Scott Sherrill]

Carl Keil wrote:

> Hey,
>
> Does anyone have a nifty solution for backing up home dirs?  All the 
> users are using Samba only.  I only have about 20 users.  But I'd like 
> one of the users (kindof the school power user) to be able to drag 
> copies to her workstation once a week or so for safety.  I was trying 
> to get a "postexec" command to tar each persons home dir when they log 
> out.  But it's not working and I have no idea how to troubleshoot it.  
> (People are connecting from Macs mainly and I'm wondering if the Mac 
> ejecting the drive even counts as a "log out".)  Any ideas?  How are 
> folks without tape drives or a backuppc server backing up home drives 
> on a smaller network.  I need an ingenious solution.  I'm looking at 
> cron next, but I've never made my own cron script before, I've only 
> typed in commands that I've found in online documentation for various 
> programs, etc.
>

ck.

Besides the backuppc method (which is excellent btw), if your home 
directories are on a LVM you can do snapshots built in.  So when a file 
changes, its automatically backed up.  There are different levels you 
can set up etc.  I've not done it myself, but we use a Network Appliance 
for home directories and it has built in snapshoting.

a hastily googled reference:

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/snapshots_backup.html

Scott