backup software recommendations?

[der.hans]

Am 12. Jul, 2008 schwätzte Joseph Sinclair so:

> I ended up using DAR for a backup I needed to do to a 500G USB drive.  It took roughly 28 hours (USB isn't a very good filesystem interface, especially for 400G of backup data...), but it worked fairly well.

My USB connected drive seems to get about 400GB in less time than I sleep
in a day. It doesn't handle rsync, though. That'll just keep going on and
on and on and on and on ... :(. At another location USB connected drives
handle rsnapshots just fine, but those backups are only a few GB.

> Below is the command I ran (from /, and after dropping the system into single user mode, very important when backing up the root filesystem...)

At this point, why do you need to drop to single user mode to backup /?

We don't want to backup pipes, etc. We don't want to backup procfs. Is 
there a reason we'd want to backup devfs? tmpfs? other specialty
filesystems?

Logs might be a bit mangled at the end, but they're text files and I can
live with half a line at the end.

Not backing up /tmp or /var/tmp anyway.

/var is the only thing that should be changing much in most instances.

Specialty shops, e.g. ISPs with boatloads of accounts being created,
changed or deleted need to be careful with their authentication
mechanisms. For that reason they should be using LDAP or something rather
than /etc/passwd and friends anyway. Whatever they use should have it's
own safe backup mechanism that provides a dump that can be backed up.

ciao,

der.hans
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