[wellylug] the eternal question - backups

[David Antliff]

For some time now I have had a home LAN backup system consisting of a 
bunch of Perl scripts I wrote, some spare disk space, and SSH. It works 
pretty well, but it's not really 'good enough'. Now that HDD space is so 
cheap, I can't see the point in fiddling around with which 
files/directories are to be backed up - I'd like to just do a weekly or 
monthly full backup, and daily incrementals in the meantime.

So I started to have a look around. Lets see:

rsnapshot
rdiff-backup
duplicity
hdup
box-backup
dar
wrappers around rsync
...

the list goes on.

Several of these would work quite well from my point of view, but I'd like 
to get opinions on these.

Here's my setup (roughly):

three workstations containing linux installations + user files.
one headless server with oodles of disk space.
100mbps LAN.

I'd like the workstations to 'push' backups onto the remote headless 
server (rsnapshot 'pulls' unfortunately AFAICS) and create 
grandfather-father-son incrementals. Encryption of backups is not 
important.

dar is looking promising - is anyone using this?  rdiff-backup looks 
fairly useful too.

-- 
David.