Easy Automated Snapshot-Style Backups with Linux and Rsync

http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots

by pan69 • 16 years ago

16 18 16 years ago

_delirium• 16 years ago

Are there any pros/cons to this approach versus rdiff-backup?: http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/

andrewcooke2• 16 years ago

rdiff-backup does (more or less) the same thing, but is simpler to use, as far as i can tell (i switched from rsync to rdiff-backup about a year ago, and haven't looked back).

barrkel• 16 years ago

I use rdiff-backup too, and since it stores the diffs, you can go back in time.

I also backup the rdiff-backup tree itself to a remote location.

andrewvc• 16 years ago

I use rsnapshot and rdiff-backup, the big difference is rdiff-backup chokes on larger file volumes. I have a backup with a million+ video and image files, at around 600 gigs. rdiff-backup doesn't like this very much, and spends way more time backing it up than rsnapshot. There were other more serious problems, but I made the switch a year or two ago and I can't remember what they were.

Additionally, the braindead simplicity of rsnapshot makes it much easier to verify backups without having to do a restore first.

That said, I use rdiff-backup to back up /etc on all my systems to a local backup directory for quick access if anything gets accidentally fucked up while reconfiguring a service. It really is better for small datasets.

My backup hierarchy, in terms of complexity / size of the job, generally goes: rdiff-backup (small stuff) -> rsnapshot (bigger stuff) -> bacula (mammoth stuff)

cperciva4• 16 years ago

Obvious, but worth pointing out anyway: This is only an option if you trust the remote system you're using for storing your backups and you're sure that it's secure.

hga3• 16 years ago

Rsyncrypto (http://rsyncrypto.lingnu.com/index.php/Home_Page) offers a partial solution to the "is the remote side secure?" problem (it weakens the cryptosystem used to allow rsync to mostly transfer changes).

As for trust, rsync.net is well established, is run by and for people like us, and seems to do a good job.

cperciva4• 16 years ago

a partial solution to the "is the remote side secure?" problem

No. Not at all. Reusing CBC IVs is not a solution to anything.

jfarmer• 16 years ago

Or if security isn't a (top) priority.

bshep• 16 years ago

Regarding making the backups read-only after they are made, but still allowing new backups to be made:

Why not use the snapshot facility of LVM?

Once you are done with a backup, create a snapshot and make it read-only. You can always mount the snapshot to see your data at that point in time and you dont need to worry about the data being erased in the live partition.

znull2• 16 years ago

http://www.dirvish.org/ and http://rsnapshot.org/ are both wrappers around rsync that do exactly this. Eventually, though, I switched to http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ for the network backends and the encryption.

weaksauce• 16 years ago

How do you like duplicity? That looks like a good solution for my work backups.

andrewcooke2• 16 years ago

some of the comments about rdiff-backup (below) might also apply to duplicity, since it seems to share much of the same internals (duplicity seems to be the encrypted version of rdiff-backup).

znull2• 16 years ago

I haven't pushed it very hard. I'm only using it for personal stuff.

That said, it's pretty good at DWIM for a command-line tool. It works as advertised and doesn't require any fiddling once you have it set up.

cons: command line syntax is verbose. Enough so that there's a wrapper for it (http://duply.net/) which I also recommend. Access to backups isn't as straightforward as with forest-of-hardlinks approaches.

I'd be interested to hear how it holds up to production use.

Easy Automated Snapshot-Style Backups with Linux and Rsync

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