[geeks] Backup Schemes?

[Dan Duncan]

On Wed, 26 Apr 2006, Doug McLaren wrote:
> I'm with Bill on this one, though I'm just using rsync by itself.
> (But dirvish and rsnapshot look cool, I may do that soon.)

Definitely look into it.  Rsnapshot makes the already-great rsync
even more useful.

> At this point, tape drives and media are so expensive compared to hard
> drives, it's easier to back up to hard drives for the home user.

Hear, hear.  I rsync my data files from my main server to a
similar-storage server on another floor of the house.  It's
quick (after the first time, for which I actually put the hard
drive in the same server) and I also use heartbeat so the spare
server will actually pick up the IP address of the first one and
continue serving the data if it goes down.

Rsync also allows bandwidth-throttling if you want to avoid
saturating a slow uplink for offsite backups.

> I've got a 300 GB drive on one my computers dedicated to backups that
> I rsync stuff to (and unmount when not in use), and a script that does
> incrementals of sort to another disk, just backing up the smaller
> files that have changed since the last run in certain directories

Oh, definitely give rsnapshot a try.  It creates a directory for
every run, but files that haven't changed are hard links so only
your changes occupy space and you won't have to mess with restoring
both the full and then your incrementals if need be.  Just pick
the directory for the point in time you desire and copy everything
from it.

> Considering that the 300 GB drive was about $100, and the USB drive
> was about $50, it's hard to justify anything like DLT drives and
> media.

Sing it.  I haven't powered up my DLT libraries in months.
Anybody want a couple of ADIC 7-tape DLT(4000?) libraries
in the Colorado Springs area?

-DanD

-- 
#  Dan Duncan (kd4igw)  dand at pcisys.net  http://pcisys.net/~dand
# If electricity comes from electrons, does that mean that morality comes
# from morons?  From "Ask Dr. Science"