[Gllug] local backup solution

[Nix]

On 13 Jan 2010, Richard Jones verbalised:
> 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

I now do something similar (well, I'm only using one USB disk because
it's a backup *of* a RAID array and anything more would be overkill
even for me).

However...

> (2) ... but there's no compression,
[...]
> (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),

Both of these disadvantages are eliminated by rdiff-backup. rsync
algorithm, network-capable and all, but time-travel-capable (by
storing compressed rsync-diffs).

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

Likewise: you only need to use the rdiff-backup tool if you want to
restore a past image or are backing up as non-root and want to preserve
permissions and ownership.
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