[Gllug] local backup solution

[Richard Jones]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 11:41:28PM +0000, Martin wrote:
> Hi all,
> I'm looking for a local backup solution. Every week there will be some 
> new or modified files. I think it would be reasonable to apply 
> incremental backup every Friday and a full backup at the end of the 
> month. Does it sound right to you? I don't think the amount of data will 
> be very high. I'm guessing around 50MB per week.
> At the moment it'll only be a local backup on a CD. We don't have any 
> server yet. We're thinking of automatically creating tar.gz/bz2 packages 
> at the end of the week and burning them on CDs (also automatically - 
> cdrecord?). Obviously, a CD would have to be put into a drive manually.

I use rsync to copy everything over the network to another machine
that has several cheap USB disks arranged in a RAID array.  The first
rsync takes a long time because it's copying everything.  Subsequent
invocations are relatively quick because they just copy incremental
changes.

Note several advantages and disadvantages to this scheme:

(1) USB hard disks are very cheap,

(2) ... but there's no compression,

(3) ... and USB hard disks are pretty unreliable.

(4) No ability to go back in time as you would have with a real
incremental backup.  So if you delete something and realize a month
later, then it's gone forever (if you use the rsync --delete option
anyway, or you overwrote the file),

(5) ... but it's very easy to restore files.  Just ssh to the other
machine and copy back any files you need.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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