[Mageia-discuss] [Ticket #16] Preferred backup program / drakbackup

[Eugeni Dodonov]

On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 22:33, Jeff Robins <jeffrobinssae at gmail.com> wrote:

> What backup program(s) does everyone else use?
>
> I have multiple computers that backup to a server.  The server gets
> backed-up to a removable hard-drive.
>

If you are looking for a big and scalable solution, suitable for any case,
and you have a dedicated server, bacula is certainly the best out there. But
it is also very, very non-end-user-friendly and requires lots of config file
editing to get started. But when you master it, it will save you life at
each step and will do magic with your backups.

If you are thinking about simple backup solution for some common directories
(say, /etc/, /home/, ...), there are drakbackup and draksnapshot in
Mandriva/Mageia. Each has its peculiarities, but they do the job fine in
most cases.

If you want to go deeper and manage your own backups and syncronization, you
cannot escape much from rsync, unison, rsnapshot and tar - and its variants.
There are plenty of alternatives and UIs for each of them.

If you are thinking on hard-disk backup solutions, and system imaging, there
are many options to choose from - ghost4linux, dd+rdiff :), dump/restore,
unirecovery (but this one is still proprietary I think, and is mostly
available for OEMs), and now carbono [1], which is developed by the same
guys (me included, but without much time to play with it unfortunately) who
developed unirecovery application at mstech.

And finally, if you just want to backup some subset of files in a
space-efficient manner,
http://students.ceid.upatras.gr/~sxanth/ungit.htmlgives a nice
overview about how to use git for that. Basically, it can be
done with the following trivial script:

#!/bin/sh
for backup in /home/eugeni /etc/ /var/config; do
  pushd $backup
  git add .
  git commit -a -m "Backed up on %d.%m.%y"
  git push server
  popd
done

(Of course, you must setup initial git infra with 'git init', and setup
remote branches for each of backup'able directories, but I'll skip those
instructions as they are available in any git tutorial - just yell if you
need some help with that).

Besides those tricks, there are also hundreds of other backup applications
and solutions. I tried to describe the most common scenarios, but it all
depends on your needs of course.

P.S.: Real hackers don't backup configs and applications, they commit their
settings upstream and just reinstall the packages when needed :).

[1] https://github.com/umago/carbono

-- 
Eugeni Dodonov
http://eugeni.dodonov.net/
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