[RLUG] Data backup

[John Dell]

Sebastian Smith wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> In light of the "Data Recovery" thread, how many of you have some kind of
> backup scheme for your home computers?  What is the method to your backup
> madness?  I don't know about the rest of you, but it's near impossible for
> me to backup all of my data.  With data storage "requirements" growing so
> rapidly I fail to see how we can affordably backup or data.
>   
I think this topic was discussed on RLUG awhile back.  The two packages 
that came up were rsnapshot and backuppc.  Rsnapshot is good stuff, but 
backuppc does everything rsnapshot does, plus a whole lot more.

It took me a while to get around to implementing BackupPC 
(http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/), but I have to say, it is simply 
awesome.  For me, if I can't completely automate the backup process, I 
just won't do it.  So, online storage is the only way to go.  Flipping 
tapes is so 90's :-)

The killer feature of backuppc is file pooling.  This allows an 
unbelievable retention policy for online backups (I'm keeping about 6 
months of weeklys online and could go much higher).  In the words of the 
backuppc website, 'Identical files across multiple backups of the same 
or different PCs are stored only once' (it symlinks the new backup to 
the real file if it hasn't changed).

Other nice features:
- You can do restores from the web interface (if you allow it in the setup).
- You can backup Win32 as well as  *nix.  For *nix I use rsync over ssh, 
for win32 I use regular rsync (cwrsync - cygwin rsync package) 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sereds/.  Rsync over ssh is supposed to 
work on win32 also (with the cygwin package), but it gave me fits.
- It does backup compression

The best part is that it all really works and works well without 
maintenance (it will email you if it has trouble completing a backup in 
an alloted time period).  I _highly recommend_ backuppc to anyone 
looking for online, maintenance-free backups.

John