[wellylug] Rotating backups

[Dagan]

On Sun, 2012-04-29 at 09:23 +1200, Phil Donaldson wrote:
> Hi, I just joined this list. 
> 
> Can anyone suggest a good tool to use to set up rotating backups on my
> suse 10.1 file server?
> 
> Backups will be written to my NAS disk and I'll swap the disk every
> week so I have offsite backups.
> I'm looking for both daily and fortnightly rotating backups.
> Every day the backup will be written to a file named daily-mon,
> daily-tue, daily-wed etc so I end up with 7 daily backups going back 1
> week that over-write each other.
> Every fortnight the backup file will be written to a file named
> weekly-1, weekly-2, weekly-3 etc so I end up with 26 fortnightly
> backups going back a year that over-write each other.
> 
> I'm also interested in paying someone to set it up so I'd appreciate
> any info on where to find good linux support in Welly or someone who'd
> interested in doing this for me.

 I would suggest a plan that covers the loss of your off-site disk, and
you need to plan to do a restore test at least once a month (pick a
random day to restore, test key files for corruption).

 If you are not restore testing the back-ups, then you are not managing
back-ups properly.
 
 If you have small amounts of data, a full back-up each night would
work.

 For larger amounts of data, you can do differential back-ups each
night, a full back-up on weekends. That way you have less back-ups to
worry about (full & nightly differential) should anything go wrong.

 I recommend back-up tools rather than shell scripts. The back-up tool
will have better features (eg checking files were modified)
 I have used Bacula, but the Duplicity/lDeja-Dup tool mentioned by Jim
is good (comes default with Fedora now).

 In terms of paid support, I believe Open Systems Specialists
http://oss.co.nz/ have a Wellington office, and Catalyst IT might be
able to handle all the back-ups for you in their data centre.
 Not sure the costs there, but they are both good companies.

 Dagan