[Gllug] following up to Tushar's backup talk

[Philip Hands]

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Hi Folks,

Just thought I'd mention BackupPC:

  http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

It is a backup-to-disk solution, using rsync as the transport, with some
extra bells & whistles that allows it to do stuff like compressed backups
where it keeps track of the uncompressed checksums to allow it to still
take advantage of rsync's partial file transfer features.

It also does a regular (daily or not as preferred) scan of the archive,
where it hard-links all duplicate copies of the same file, regardless of
which machine, or which backup they are part of, so that you can cheerfully
backup hundreds of machines, including their full OS, because chances are
the OS will be exactly duplicated, so you only end up with one copy's worth
of disk used.

You can also select pretty much any pattern of partial and full backups,
and how many to keep for how long, all of which can be fairly space
efficient, since you're only really keeping the stuff that changed, and
linking the rest.

It understands that laptops are not always there, and will ping for them
and do backups when it gets the chance (that includes not doing backups if
the ping round-trip is too long, which is taken to indicate that you're
logged in over a VPN, and so probably don't want it trying to do a backup
over your GPRS connection, say)

It also has a web front end where users can be allowed to look at the
backup of their machine, and so can restore files without needing to bother
admin staff.

Oh, and you can install rsync on 'doze (somehow, I'm told) and back up your
 lusers.

I use this for backing up several of my customers via ADSL, back to my
place, and it works brilliantly -- at some point I need to write a
debian-installer .udeb to allow you to do a restore straight from the
standard boot media -- at present you'd need to do it by hand using wget
and tar, which would be doable, but not trivial, from d-i media -- should
be fairly straight forward from knoppix or similar, but that seems like
cheating ;-)

Cheers, Phil.
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