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

[Andres Kaaber]

Once my friend, Oracle DBA, told me that backup is for weak, when he
was restoring a lost database, manually ;)

2011/7/17 Eugeni Dodonov <eugeni at dodonov.net>:
> 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.html
> gives 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/
>



-- 
A. Kaaber