[wellylug] the eternal question - backups

David Antliff dave.antliff at paradise.net.nz
Fri May 27 13:51:45 NZST 2005


On Fri, 27 May 2005, Richard Wade wrote:
> My favourite solution was Dump & Restore


Thanks, I shall definitely take a look at it.

> 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.

That's more-or-less what I currently do, but it doesn't provide enough 
'history' - if I corrupt or delete a file and don't notice for a day or 
two, it finds itself on the backup.  That's why I am considering 
differential or incremental schemes.

> 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.

That is good advice in general. One advantage of DAR is that it's quite 
widely used (forms the heart of several other backup systems) an a fairly 
straightforward program (it's like tar, but with catalogues and a few 
other bits and pieces). SaraB is just a shell script that uses DAR, and I 
have no trouble maintaining that myself if I really had to. It doesn't do 
any fancy ssh stuff, but it works fine on an NFS or samba mount.


Thanks,
David.




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