backup software recommendations?

[Joseph Sinclair]

der.hans wrote:
> Am 12. Jul, 2008 schw�tzte 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.
---
My system seems to have trouble running more than 4Mb/s over any USB interface, probably a limitation in the internal(very poor quality) USB chipsets.

> 
>> 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 /?
---
In a typical home workstation system, there are dozens of programs running at any given time, and it's just plain SAFER to get rid of all that stuff if you're doing a full system backup (homedir-only is a completely different matter).  I don't have the resources for a whole stream of full system backups (1 500GB drive is about all I can squeeze in at the current time), so the one backup I have has to *WORK*.
I kept out all the virtual devices and non-critical directories, but that still leaves a lot of room for one unfortunate daemon to screw the whole thing up.

> 
> 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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