backup and disaster recovery

[Matt Alexander]

On Tue, 29 Oct 2002, Bill Jonas wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 29, 2002 at 08:43:00PM -0500, George Toft wrote:
> > I would try to be smart about what I mirror.  You don't need to copy a
> > file that hasn't changed, so I would run find / -ctime -1 to get a list
> > of files whose status has changed in the last day, and mirror those.
> > Next, you have to account for deleted files.  I can think of a few
> > ways.  The one I used was running find periodically and using diff to
> > see what is missing from the last time I ran it.  Delete those files.  I
> > synced 4 servers every 20 minutes this way.  Fortunately, the
> > filesystems were small so find didn't kill the system.
>
> What about rsync(1)?  It can work on local filesystems, too.  You might
> need a little magic to keep it from trying to sync /mirror or whatever
> with itself, but other than that, it shouldn't be a problem.  (Minor
> magic like running a for loop over /* and grepping out /mirror, for
> example.)

I would also strongly recommend rsync.  The first time you use it, I
guarantee you'll shout out, "Sweet!!"