[wellylug] the eternal question - backups

[Richard Wade]

> On Fri, 27 May 2005, Chris Hodgetts wrote:

> At the moment I am experimenting with SaraB + dar, which seems fairly
> close to what I want to do.

I've played with many open source backup packages in the past but have
ended up reverting to a simple solution.

My favourite solution was Dump & Restore
(http://freshmeat.net/projects/dumprestore/), which ran as a cron job from
a central file server with a tape system attached. The server remotely
logged in to all configured clients and performed dump backups of the
filesystems to tape. This worked REALLY well.

My current solution is plain old rsync, running from a cron job, to sync
selected directories with backup space on a remote share. This share is an
external, USB2.0, hard disk.

The problem with many of the open source packages is that they're either
used by many people and therefore get quite complex due to the feature
requests, or they do a basic job and become abandonware due to lack of
interest/motivation.

I would stick with something simple, widely used, and well established.
That way, it'll continue to be supported, it'll not go out of fashion (so
you don't need to ditch your old backups when you decide to adopt another
package), and there's a lot of documentation and support out there to
consult.
--
rik