Am 10. Dec, 2004 schwätzte Mark Phillips so:

> What is the best (or at least a good) way to perform backups?
>
> I have about 4.5 GB in my home directory, and I just installed a new 120
> GB drive on my network to use for backups. I tried a simple tar and
> compress, and I ran into a 2.0 Gb file size limitation. There seems to
> be a 2.2 GB avi file in the files I want to back up. After an initial
> backup, I would like to perform incremental backups on a periodic basis.
>
> Is there a Debian package that will handle this task?

There are several packages available in debian that will essentially rsync
your data across the network ( make sure to have them use ssh rather than
rsh ) and then use hard links to create the backups in a space efficient
manner.

Let's say you schedule backups of your home directory every night at 01:00
and the first one runs tonight. Let's say that after tonight's backup
nothing changes in your home directory until Sunday night when you return
from a weekend in .hi.us ( might as well go someplace fun ).

The backup that runs tonight would make a full copy of everything in your
home directory. The backup that runs tomorrow night would copy nothing
because nothing had changed. It would, however, create a tree that looks
like everything has been copied. The new 'copies' would just be hard links
to the original copies. If something had changed, then only that thing
would be copied over.

Data recovery just requires scping the files back.

I use fau_backup. There are several other projects in debian that do
something similar. I first needed this with a mixed environment of potato
and woody and fau_backup was the best option at the time. I don't know if
there are better packages available now.

You could then use backup to CD/DVD packages to create offsite copies from
the backup repository.

One feature missing from fau_backup is the ability to kill all instances
of a file. Let's say you decide to axe that avi file. You'd have to search
the backup directory for files with the same inode number and then axe all
of them. At least I think that would work...

ciao,

der.hans
-- 
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