[Cialug] Backups with rsync

[Dave J. Hala Jr.]

I've never been a fan of incremental backups. Ever do a complete restore
from a daily incremental backup set? If one of the backup sets is bad,
you can be hosed.

For what a cheap ide drive costs nowadays, you might as well just do a
full backup every night and save yourself the headache. If you are
worried about the "reliability" of the cheap ide drives, use two or
three or four of them with software raid...

Depending on how large your backup files are, you may be able to also
store them on the CD/RW's or DVD/RW's and rotate the media out weekly,
taking a copy off-site.

If they are truly "mission" critical backups, the cost of the back-up
system shouldn't be a factor. (It just needs to be reasonable) It just
needs to be reliable and able to be restored quickly. 



:) Dave


On Sun, 2005-02-20 at 10:06, Jonathan Bailey wrote:
> I want to do incremental backups since they take less disk space in the 
> end (full backups every Sunday for example). I'd then like to rsync 
> those backups to another server. This is what I'm using for incremental 
> backups now - it's not perfect, but I'm lookign for better.
> 
>  rsync -av --exclude-from=/root/rs.exclude 
> --compare-dest=/backup/backup-$WEK/ /home/ 
> /backup/backup-$WEK-$DATESTAMP/ > /backup/backup-$WEK-$DATESTAMP.log
> 
> 
> 
> Jon
> 
> 
> 
> Academician Kula wrote:
> 
> >On Sat, Feb 19, 2005 at 08:21:08PM -0600, Jonathan Bailey wrote:
> >  
> >
> >>I'm currently using rsync to do a backup every night. I'd like to do 
> >>incremental backups, just storing the changed files every backup cycle. 
> >>I'm thinking of a full backup on Sunday, and incremental every other day 
> >>of the week. I know you can use --link-dest with rsync, but I don't want 
> >>all the hard links. How can I make it back up only the changed files 
> >>(and structure)?
> >>    
> >>
> >
> >You might use find with the appropriate options to find all files
> >changed since a certain time, and feed that list to rsync. Newer
> >versions of rsync have a --files-from flag, which just takes a list
> >of files to copy.   
> >
> >I am curious why you don't want hard links --- I've been using rsync
> >with hard links to do backups for a while now and it seems to work
> >well for me. Knowing a bit more about your situation may give us ideas
> >for you to try.    
> >
> >
> >
> >  
> >
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Cialug mailing list
> Cialug@cialug.org
> http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug
-- 

Open Source Information Systems (OSIS)
Dave J. Hala Jr. <dave@osis.us>
641.485.1606