[wellylug] Rotating backups

[Jim Tittsler]

On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 09:23, Phil Donaldson <philtm at anyware.co.nz> wrote:
>
> Can anyone suggest a good tool to use to set up rotating backups on my
> suse 10.1 file server?

Rather than doing the rotating backup style, I would encourage you to
investigate rdiff-backup and/or duplicity.  Each makes it possible to
restore files at a point "back in time" while storing them in a space
efficient way.  Duplicity (and the deja-dup GUI front end you may be
familiar with) make it easy to store encrypted backups, which is
particularly handy when the backups are stored on remote servers you
don't absolutely trust.  I've used these both at home and commercially
for years now, and really value the convenience, ready availability of
"old" data, and automation.
  http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/
  http://duplicity.nongnu.org/

(And in fact, I would further suggest that you store somewhere in the
cloud rather than your proposed manual disk swap.  Humans *always*
seem to be the weakest link in any backup scheme.  Unless you have
multiple GB of fresh content each day, backing up over the net seems
practical even at NZ speeds.  S3 is cheap and redundant.  Cheaper or
more flexible options abound.)

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