Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Chen Wei]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 10:37:58AM -0600, Glenn Holmer wrote:
> On 02/16/2017 10:34 AM, Francesco Porro wrote:
> > On 16/02/2017 14:50, Hans wrote:
> > Ok, now I'm trying back-in-time. After some setting up, it's working and
> > copying 60+ GB from my Home to the external usb3 drive. And it's quite fast!
> 
> I've been using backintime for years and am very satisfied with it.

I wrote a script to run backintime style backup from remote machine.

https://github.com/infinet/rsync-time-machine


> 
> -- 
> Glenn Holmer (Linux registered user #16682)
> "After the vintage season came the aftermath -- and Cenbe."
> 

-- 
Chen Wei

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Francesco Porro]

On 16/02/2017 21:26, Glenn English wrote:
> No. I've never used it, but a friend of mine does. And it takes forever
> for him to do a backup. So I assumed it was dd.  Maybe it's that other
> OS X disk clone 'backup.'
> 
> But when he's done, he doesn't have an incremental backup, just a clone.
> Better than nothing, but not wonderful for programmers and lawyers who
> have to retrieve last week's version.

CCC has either cloning feature and backup feature. It simply let you
choose during the initial steps. I've always used it in the backup
"mode", but sincerely i don't think it relies on dd even for cloning.

dd is for low-level, byte-to-byte, copying, dumping.


> Amanda, IMHO, is the proper backup. But 'simple', 'user friendly', and
> 'amanda' should never appear in the same paragraph. There's significant
> futzing required to get it going. At least mine did, back in the DLT days...

I never saw those DLT days... :)

-- 
fp
pgp: 0x45399C26

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Jonathan Dowland]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 11:43:27AM +0100, Francesco Porro wrote:
> On 16/02/2017 03:39, Martin McCormick wrote:
> > I use rsnapshot. 
> 
> Very nice one! This has what I was looking for, indeed there's a link in
> the main page to the article that I posted before. I'll give it a try,
> for sure!

I used to use rsnapshot, which is not much of a conceptual step up from
rsync, and thus is an easy tool to use, but the architectural decision to
keep hard link trees for each increment caused me a lot of problems for
large mailboxes (lots and lots of small files; high ratio of filesystem
metadata to actual data). Deleting old increments was very computationally
expensive.

So instead I use rdiff-backup. It's a very similar tool but it uses a more
clever scheme for storing increments. The most recent increment is available
as simple files, and most restores are of the last backup. The scheme it uses
for increments is quite simple, well documented and third party tools exist
to manipulate it, which gives me confidence.

-- 
Jonathan Dowland
Please do not CC me, I am subscribed to the list.


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Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Glenn English]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 11:06 AM, Francesco Porro  wrote:

>
> Are you sure?


No. I've never used it, but a friend of mine does. And it takes forever for
him to do a backup. So I assumed it was dd.  Maybe it's that other OS X
disk clone 'backup.'

But when he's done, he doesn't have an incremental backup, just a clone.
Better than nothing, but not wonderful for programmers and lawyers who have
to retrieve last week's version.

Amanda, IMHO, is the proper backup. But 'simple', 'user friendly', and
'amanda' should never appear in the same paragraph. There's significant
futzing required to get it going. At least mine did, back in the DLT days...

-- 
Glenn English

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Francesco Porro]

On 16/02/2017 18:27, Glenn English wrote:
> 
> 
> On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 3:42 AM, Francesco Porro  > wrote:
> 
> 
> When I was on Mac OS X, several years ago, I used to use CCC (carbon
> copy cloner) which I liked a lot, and never found any similar on PC
> (Win/Linux).
> 
> 
> That would be dd (CLI). I believe that's what's under the CCC GUI on OS-X.
> 
> -- 
> Glenn English

Are you sure? Actually I thought it was (and is) based on rsync with a
solid and very flexible GUI. I don't think it's based on dd.

-- 
fp
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Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Francesco Porro]

On 16/02/2017 17:33, Erwan David wrote:
>> I've already tried the latter before, when I was on Ubuntu (it comes
>> preinstalled in ubuntu). The thing I didn't like too much of deja-dup
>> was the inability to set a threshold for the backups to keep. I mean: i
>> wasn't able to say: hey, keep N backup levels and flush the oldest
>> ones... But I didn't dig too much, so that I don't really know if this
>> is actually possible (maybe via conf file) or not.
>>
> 
> It is possible to do this with duply (but no GUI conf for it)

That's cool! I'll check this duply later ... :)

Good advice, Erwan.

-- 
fp
pgp: 0x45399C26

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Francesco Porro]

On 16/02/2017 17:36, Boyan Penkov wrote:
> 
> 
> On 02/16/2017 11:27 AM, Francesco Porro wrote:
>> On 16/02/2017 15:03, Boyan Penkov wrote:
>>> I similarly found this to be a pain, and then decided to wrap a few
>>> calls to duplicity-clean, and --keep-all-but-N in a shell script that
>>> gets anacron'd...
>> Well this is the workaround! :) I'll try it later. Thanks!
>>
> Certainly; please let me know -- I can also send a sketch of the code
> (as this will be useful for me as well, since nobody's looked at it...)
> 
> Thanks!

If you wish to send me any piece of code you wrote to get the work with
duplicity easier, this would be appreciated. Only, I can't grant you
that i'm trying it out too soon. :)


-- 
fp
pgp: 0x45399C26

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Glenn English]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 3:42 AM, Francesco Porro  wrote:

>
> When I was on Mac OS X, several years ago, I used to use CCC (carbon
> copy cloner) which I liked a lot, and never found any similar on PC
> (Win/Linux).
>

That would be dd (CLI). I believe that's what's under the CCC GUI on OS-X.

-- 
Glenn English

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Francesco Porro]

On 16/02/2017 14:50, Hans wrote:
> Yes, of course. I did not see, that you meant "daily backups". For daily 
> backups try "back-in-time", it is nicely configurable and is based on rsync 
> and 
> some other tools. And you can configure time based backups and restores.

Yes I forgot to say some details... :)

Ok, now I'm trying back-in-time. After some setting up, it's working and
copying 60+ GB from my Home to the external usb3 drive. And it's quite fast!

FYI I've tryed the option "use the files' checksum" to discover file
changes but that was too much time consuming! If enabled the process
gets too longer for me, so I disabled it back.

There's also a nice option to start the backup once a day if and when
the device is connected (udev). This is what I mean with "user-friendly" :)

> For a single folder (with subfolders) I suggest "unison" and "unison-gtk", 
> which is available for linux, mac and windows. You can use it within a single 
> computer or use it from computer to computer. It is based on rsync and ssh.
> Very easy to use.

I installed also Unison but to me it appeared more useful to syncronize
two folders in in a bidirectional way. Correct me if I'm wrong.

> Happy hacking
> 
> Hans

Yeah! Thanks a lot!

-- 
fp
pgp: 0x45399C26

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Erwan David]

Le 02/16/2017 à 15:01, Francesco Porro a écrit :
> On 16/02/2017 14:45, Boyan Penkov wrote:
>>
>> On 02/16/2017 08:33 AM, Francesco Porro wrote:
>>>
>>> If I'm not wrong, this one is based on "dup" and works the same way?
>>
>> I don't think so; which "dup" are you referring to? -- the most I know
>> is that DejaDup is a GTK front-end for it.
> 
> Oh sorry, it was a lapsus! Dupicity is the backend for Deja-dup, of
> course! :D
> 
> I've already tried the latter before, when I was on Ubuntu (it comes
> preinstalled in ubuntu). The thing I didn't like too much of deja-dup
> was the inability to set a threshold for the backups to keep. I mean: i
> wasn't able to say: hey, keep N backup levels and flush the oldest
> ones... But I didn't dig too much, so that I don't really know if this
> is actually possible (maybe via conf file) or not.
> 

It is possible to do this with duply (but no GUI conf for it)

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Glenn Holmer]

On 02/16/2017 10:34 AM, Francesco Porro wrote:
> On 16/02/2017 14:50, Hans wrote:
> Ok, now I'm trying back-in-time. After some setting up, it's working and
> copying 60+ GB from my Home to the external usb3 drive. And it's quite fast!

I've been using backintime for years and am very satisfied with it.

-- 
Glenn Holmer (Linux registered user #16682)
"After the vintage season came the aftermath -- and Cenbe."

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Francesco Porro]

On 16/02/2017 15:03, Boyan Penkov wrote:
> I similarly found this to be a pain, and then decided to wrap a few
> calls to duplicity-clean, and --keep-all-but-N in a shell script that
> gets anacron'd...

Well this is the workaround! :) I'll try it later. Thanks!

-- 
fp
pgp: 0x45399C26

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 16 February 2017 05:08:34 Francesco Porro wrote:

> On 16/02/2017 01:02, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > Very simple: amanda
>
> Well, Amanda looks a bit too complex for my typical home needs, and
> seems to me more server,centralized-backup oriented. However it seems
> also very powerful and flexible, so I'll keep it into account for the
> future. Thanks!
>
> > Cheers, Gene Heskett
>
> Cheers!

Well, I am used to it.  And I've been using it here, first with 1 machine 
and tapes, but that got outgrown as the machines were added, and many 
years ago I discovered 2 things (I've used it since 1998)
1. Common hard drives are 5000x more dependable than tapes.
2. Common hard drives are 1/10 to 1/100th the cost of tapes & tape 
drives.

I am not a business, needing long term storage, so an $80 terabyte drive, 
formatted for 30 virtual tapes, used one a night, is as long as I need 
to retain data.

So now I am backing up 5 machines, mostly the stuff associated with the 
machining arts, two lathes and two milling machines, and this machine to 
that terabyte drive. That drive now has 65000+ spinning hours on it, but 
smartctl tools have alerted me in time to go get a replacement so no 
data has been lost in better than a decade.

And because the hard drives are random access, if I accidentally nuke a 
file I need, recovery is a few minutes operation, more time is wasted as 
I go thru the monkey business of looking up how to do the recovery, the 
actual recovery once its setup, is a 5 minute job.

What can I say, its "comfortable" to me. But its a far cry from the only 
way.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page 

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Francesco Porro]

On 16/02/2017 14:45, Boyan Penkov wrote:
> 
> On 02/16/2017 08:33 AM, Francesco Porro wrote:
>>
>> If I'm not wrong, this one is based on "dup" and works the same way?
> 
> I don't think so; which "dup" are you referring to? -- the most I know
> is that DejaDup is a GTK front-end for it.

Oh sorry, it was a lapsus! Dupicity is the backend for Deja-dup, of
course! :D

I've already tried the latter before, when I was on Ubuntu (it comes
preinstalled in ubuntu). The thing I didn't like too much of deja-dup
was the inability to set a threshold for the backups to keep. I mean: i
wasn't able to say: hey, keep N backup levels and flush the oldest
ones... But I didn't dig too much, so that I don't really know if this
is actually possible (maybe via conf file) or not.

-- 
fp
pgp: 0x45399C26

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[tomas]

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Hash: SHA1

On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 02:24:11PM +0100, Francesco Porro wrote:
> On 16/02/2017 12:04, to...@tuxteam.de wrote:
> > Now if you are talking about "Real Snapshots" (i.e. files don't change
> > during backup and stuff)
> 
> > With rsync you'll always have some skew (i.e. the world is changing
> > while the backup is running).
> 
> Well, with the word "snapshot" I meant a "dump" of all my personal data
> by daily basis. Currently I don't need to backup any additional db,
> except for Thunderbird's and Firefox's ones. It should be ok to backup
> those with no hassles via rsync or it can lead to any problems? in other
> words: can rsync make a good backup of all my '~', including databases
> of application like FF and TB (also if they're running)?

It depends :-)

I wouldn't count on FF (and perhaps TB) to get their state "rescued" if
you backup while running them: apart from there being tons of files
in there, there are "database-like" files, like several Berkeley DB and
several sqlite. While the biggest bulk is cache (and thus kind-of
recoverable [1]), the whole mess might crawl along while backup is
going through it.

Depends on how much value you attach to it. If losing it on a blue moon
is an option, don't worry: it will work "mostly". If not, you'd have to
complement your rsync thing with taking dumps of the important things
(e.g. bookmarks, whatever you care about) which are quiescent at rsync
time (akin to taking a dump of an SQL database which gets backed up).

For an SQL database it's a good thing to do anyway, since you get a
backup which is hopefully portable across DBMS software versions.

> > I had such a contraption running at a customer's (many moons ago) [...]

> Yes, this is a useful method I can think about, and it is almost the
> same thing described in mike rubel's article linked in my first message.
> It should be ok, maybe with some scripting and scheduling via cron.

Customer was happy :-)

> Ps. is it ok to pgp sign messages on a mailinglist? I'm asking just
> because I did so in the first post, but don't know if it's ok or
> compliant with m/l policy.

I've been signing mine all the time and nobody scolded me for that
(for other things, though... ;-)

regards
- -- t
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Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Hans]

 
> Hi, I've used Clonezilla a couple of months ago for cloning my sister's
> Windows partition. But perhaps this tools is more recommended for
> cloning disks/partitions than for a daily backup.

Yes, of course. I did not see, that you meant "daily backups". For daily 
backups try "back-in-time", it is nicely configurable and is based on rsync and 
some other tools. And you can configure time based backups and restores.

For a single folder (with subfolders) I suggest "unison" and "unison-gtk", 
which is available for linux, mac and windows. You can use it within a single 
computer or use it from computer to computer. It is based on rsync and ssh.
Very easy to use.

These are my favourites.

And for the mothly, maybe clonezilla, of course.

Happy hacking

Hans

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Boyan Penkov]

On 02/16/2017 08:33 AM, Francesco Porro wrote:
>
> If I'm not wrong, this one is based on "dup" and works the same way?
>

I don't think so; which "dup" are you referring to? -- the most I know
is that DejaDup is a GTK front-end for it.

-- 
Boyan Penkov
www.boyanpenkov.com




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Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Francesco Porro]

On 16/02/2017 12:18, Daniel Bareiro wrote:
> Hi, Francesco

Hi Daniel


> Another alternative could be to use Dirvish.

As stated in Dirvish' website:
«Dirvish is a fast, disk based, rotating network backup system. With
dirvish you can maintain a set of complete images of your filesystems
with unattended creation and expiration [etc]».

I think it's not the best alternative for me at this moment, also the
project seems to be kinda stuck since 2014.

Thank you anyway!

-- 
fp
pgp: 0x45399C26

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Francesco Porro]

On 16/02/2017 13:14, Boyan Penkov wrote:
> http://duplicity.nongnu.org/
> 
> I use it on remote backups when I don’t trust the destination
> (therefore, all encryption happens locally), and on local-to-local
> copies (copy home to, say, another partition).
> 
> About the only caveat is it cannon to synthetic fulls on the remote (but
> the encryption is solid….), and so I am exploring borg, attic, bup as well.
> 
> Cheers!

If I'm not wrong, this one is based on "dup" and works the same way?

-- 
fp
pgp: 0x45399C26

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Francesco Porro]

On 16/02/2017 12:23, Hans wrote:> Has anybody already mentioned
"clonezilla"?
> 
> Just usefull in case at also physical defects.

Hi, I've used Clonezilla a couple of months ago for cloning my sister's
Windows partition. But perhaps this tools is more recommended for
cloning disks/partitions than for a daily backup.

-- 
fp
pgp: 0x45399C26

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Francesco Porro]

On 16/02/2017 12:04, to...@tuxteam.de wrote:
> Now if you are talking about "Real Snapshots" (i.e. files don't change
> during backup and stuff)

> With rsync you'll always have some skew (i.e. the world is changing
> while the backup is running).

Well, with the word "snapshot" I meant a "dump" of all my personal data
by daily basis. Currently I don't need to backup any additional db,
except for Thunderbird's and Firefox's ones. It should be ok to backup
those with no hassles via rsync or it can lead to any problems? in other
words: can rsync make a good backup of all my '~', including databases
of application like FF and TB (also if they're running)?

> I had such a contraption running at a customer's (many moons ago) which made
> hourly backups and kept two week's worth of backups: just at top level there
> was a directory structure indexed by date/time and below a whole tree of
> their data. I exported it (read only!) via Samba, and from there on, they
> "Just Knew" what they had to do when they inadvertently busted That Important
> File.

Yes, this is a useful method I can think about, and it is almost the
same thing described in mike rubel's article linked in my first message.
It should be ok, maybe with some scripting and scheduling via cron.

Ps. is it ok to pgp sign messages on a mailinglist? I'm asking just
because I did so in the first post, but don't know if it's ok or
compliant with m/l policy.

-- 
fp
pgp: 0x45399C26

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Boyan Penkov]

http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ <http://duplicity.nongnu.org/>

I use it on remote backups when I don’t trust the destination (therefore, all 
encryption happens locally), and on local-to-local copies (copy home to, say, 
another partition).

About the only caveat is it cannon to synthetic fulls on the remote (but the 
encryption is solid….), and so I am exploring borg, attic, bup as well.

Cheers!
--
Boyan Penkov
www.boyanpenkov.com

> On Feb 15, 2017, at 5:37 PM, Francesco Porro <fra...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi guys, It's the first time I'm posting here. I'm both a Fedora and
> Debian user.
> 
> Which backup tool do you use?
> At this time I feel comfortable with rsync, which I use to sync my home
> to an external Usb drive. No automation, no scheduling for now. I just
> launch rsync from the command line and let it backup all the stuff when
> I need it.
> 
> Now I'd like to move to more powerful utility. It should be reliable and
> very user-friendly. A friend on Irc suggested me borg [1], which also
> feature decuplication, encryption and seems easy enough to use.
> 
> Otherwise I discovered a scripting hot-to to make some kind of snapshots
> via rsync (and hardlinking) [2], but I haven't tryed it out yet.
> 
> So... What's your opinion about user-oriented backup tools? ^^
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> 
> [1] https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
> [2] http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/
> 
> -- 
> fp
> pgp: 0x45399C26
> 

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Hans]

Has anybody already mentioned "clonezilla"?

Just usefull in case at also physical defects.

Best

Hans

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Daniel Bareiro]

Hi, Francesco

On 15/02/17 19:37, Francesco Porro wrote:

> Hi guys, It's the first time I'm posting here. I'm both a Fedora and
> Debian user.
> 
> Which backup tool do you use?
> At this time I feel comfortable with rsync, which I use to sync my home
> to an external Usb drive. No automation, no scheduling for now. I just
> launch rsync from the command line and let it backup all the stuff when
> I need it.
> 
> Now I'd like to move to more powerful utility. It should be reliable and
> very user-friendly. A friend on Irc suggested me borg [1], which also
> feature decuplication, encryption and seems easy enough to use.
> 
> Otherwise I discovered a scripting hot-to to make some kind of snapshots
> via rsync (and hardlinking) [2], but I haven't tryed it out yet.
> 
> So... What's your opinion about user-oriented backup tools? ^^

Another alternative could be to use Dirvish.


Kind regards,
Daniel



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Re: User-oriented backup tools

[tomas]

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On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 11:44:32AM +0100, Francesco Porro wrote:
> 
> 
> On 16/02/2017 09:15, to...@tuxteam.de wrote:
> > rsync.
> >
> > To a LUKS-encrypted USB drive (my laptop's drive is LUKS, so it seemed
> > to be a majot weak point to have all on an unencrpted thumb I could lose
> > anytime ;-)
> > [cut]
> 
> that's very similar to my current backup-style, I use rsync with a lot
> of options as for eg "--exclude-from=exclude.txt --> this file contains
> all the folder I do not want to copy to the destination dir.
> 
> the drawback of all this is the lack of a snapshot/multi-level backup, a
> feature that would be very useful to me.

That depends on what you mean by "snapshot" and "multi-level". If what you
want is full backups without repeating all the stuff, check out the
- --compare-dest and --link-dest options With this, you can make a backup
and the files which didn't change are just hard linked to their old version.

Since it's all hard links, you can "garbage collect" by just rm-ing old
stuff.

I had such a contraption running at a customer's (many moons ago) which made
hourly backups and kept two week's worth of backups: just at top level there
was a directory structure indexed by date/time and below a whole tree of
their data. I exported it (read only!) via Samba, and from there on, they
"Just Knew" what they had to do when they inadvertently busted That Important
File.

Now if you are talking about "Real Snapshots" (i.e. files don't change
during backup and stuff), then you've got to look into either LVM
(they say performance isn't the best) or into special file systems
(btrfs, zfs) which are really magic in this respect.

With rsync you'll always have some skew (i.e. the world is changing
while the backup is running). Don't back up a database's binary image:
always back up its dumps, or better: use the database facilities
for that.

> Anyway, I didn't know the .backup-filter stuff and it seems a very smart
> and simple tool. Thank you Tomás for sharing the whole procedure!

Yeah: the hardest (but most beautiful) part about rsync is reading its
man page. I still discover things, after years of use.

regards
- -- tomás
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Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Francesco Porro]

Sorry guys, I'm new to mailings list so I made a little mess sending
replies first to you mailbox and than to the correct mailinglist
address, resulting in two copies...

-- 
fp
pgp: 0x45399C26

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Francesco Porro]

On 16/02/2017 09:15, to...@tuxteam.de wrote:
> rsync.
>
> To a LUKS-encrypted USB drive (my laptop's drive is LUKS, so it seemed
> to be a majot weak point to have all on an unencrpted thumb I could lose
> anytime ;-)
> [cut]

that's very similar to my current backup-style, I use rsync with a lot
of options as for eg "--exclude-from=exclude.txt --> this file contains
all the folder I do not want to copy to the destination dir.

the drawback of all this is the lack of a snapshot/multi-level backup, a
feature that would be very useful to me.

Anyway, I didn't know the .backup-filter stuff and it seems a very smart
and simple tool. Thank you Tomás for sharing the whole procedure!

> regards
> -- tomás

regards

-- 
fp
pgp: 0x45399C26

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Francesco Porro]

On 16/02/2017 03:39, Martin McCormick wrote:
>   I use rsnapshot. 

Very nice one! This has what I was looking for, indeed there's a link in
the main page to the article that I posted before. I'll give it a try,
for sure!

Thank you Martin!

-- 
fp
pgp: 0x45399C26

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Francesco Porro]

On 16/02/2017 06:44, solitone wrote:
> I'm happy with backup2l [1]. It's very simple to configure, supports 
> incremental backups, and it's fully automated.

A bit of configuration is required but it seems ok and easy enough!

> I also like it because it is simple to extract specific files you may need 
> from 
> a backup.

Yes, extracting specific files from a backup should also be a
non-trouble task for me and users in general. That's why I've used rsync
until now (all files and dirs are saved as they originally are, in the
destination folder -- very easy to locate something, just navigating
through the filesystem :)).

Thanks.

-- 
fp
pgp: 0x45399C26

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Francesco Porro]

Hi Greg!

On 15/02/2017 23:42, Greg Wooledge wrote:
> Why?  What do you want to do that your existing solution doesn't do?
> Just swapping out a working solution for something more complex without
> some compelling reason is not a good idea.

Two reason:
1) In my home environment I'd like to test something else, maybe just to
look for something new and more powerful, or maybe just for curiosity. :)
2) rsync itself doesn't support multiple level of backups (as it happens
for incremental o differential backup tools) without additional
scripting. This is a feature that i'm missing quite a bit.

That's it.

When I was on Mac OS X, several years ago, I used to use CCC (carbon
copy cloner) which I liked a lot, and never found any similar on PC
(Win/Linux).

-- 
fp
pgp: 0x45399C26

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[tomas]

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On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 11:37:40PM +0100, Francesco Porro wrote:
> Hi guys, It's the first time I'm posting here. I'm both a Fedora and
> Debian user.
> 
> Which backup tool do you use?
> At this time I feel comfortable with rsync [...]

rsync.

To a LUKS-encrypted USB drive (my laptop's drive is LUKS, so it seemed
to be a majot weak point to have all on an unencrpted thumb I could lose
anytime ;-)

The command is wrapped up in some 8 lines of bash making sure home exists
and does basically:

  rsync -av --delete --filter="merge $home/.backup/filter" $home/ $backup/

deferring the filter to file ~/.backup/filter, which says:

  - /.cache/
  - /.config/
  [...other stuff to exclude...]
  dir-merge .backup-filter

The nice tidbit is the "dir-merge": this way, I can drop a filter in each
directory I don't want to back up completely, excluding all or part of
its files/subdirs (e.g. the build subdir of some biggish thing or a
typical junk download dir).

I'm so happy with that set up that I don't even think of changing that.

*Should* I some time be very bored, my next step would be to have a
live/install Debian partition on the stick (which I would somehow keep
up to date) to be able to do "bare metal" recovery, should my main
machine go down in flames.

KISS (although: rsync is smart, but simple? ;-)

regards
- -- tomás
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Re: User-oriented backup tools

[solitone]

On Wednesday, 15 February 2017 23:37:40 CET Francesco Porro wrote:
> Which backup tool do you use?

I'm happy with backup2l [1]. It's very simple to configure, supports 
incremental backups, and it's fully automated. Here you can find a short guide 
[2]. 

I also like it because it is simple to extract specific files you may need from 
a backup. For instance I had to recover just my old thunderbolt emails, and it 
was quick and easy with backup2l.

[1] http://backup2l.sourceforge.net
[2] http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/backup2l.htm

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Martin McCormick]

I use rsnapshot. I have 4 128 GB thumb drives that are
combined in to 1 large drive with the idea of backing up the
system I do most tinkering on on a daily basis for a year and
then I swap out the drives with other drives so that the year
just completed gets stored and the new drives start a new year.
At the end of the new year, I will store those drives, erase last
year's backups and re-use those older drives for the upcoming new year.

Your mileage will vary if you must backup mysql or other
data bases so you need to make sure the backup tool you want to
use safely does those backups.

Martin

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 15 February 2017 17:37:40 Francesco Porro wrote:

> Hi guys, It's the first time I'm posting here. I'm both a Fedora and
> Debian user.
>
> Which backup tool do you use?
> At this time I feel comfortable with rsync, which I use to sync my
> home to an external Usb drive. No automation, no scheduling for now. I
> just launch rsync from the command line and let it backup all the
> stuff when I need it.
>
> Now I'd like to move to more powerful utility. It should be reliable
> and very user-friendly. A friend on Irc suggested me borg [1], which
> also feature decuplication, encryption and seems easy enough to use.
>
> Otherwise I discovered a scripting hot-to to make some kind of
> snapshots via rsync (and hardlinking) [2], but I haven't tryed it out
> yet.
>
> So... What's your opinion about user-oriented backup tools? ^^
>
Very simple: amanda

> Thanks in advance.
>
> [1] https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
> [2] http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/


Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>

Re: User-oriented backup tools

[Greg Wooledge]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 11:37:40PM +0100, Francesco Porro wrote:
> At this time I feel comfortable with rsync, which I use to sync my home
> to an external Usb drive. No automation, no scheduling for now. I just
> launch rsync from the command line and let it backup all the stuff when
> I need it.

This is what I do, too.  Except I also rsync changes from my VPS, and
also make a second copy of parts of the data and burn that to a DVD+RW.

> Now I'd like to move to more powerful utility.

Why?  What do you want to do that your existing solution doesn't do?
Just swapping out a working solution for something more complex without
some compelling reason is not a good idea.

User-oriented backup tools

[Francesco Porro]

Hi guys, It's the first time I'm posting here. I'm both a Fedora and
Debian user.

Which backup tool do you use?
At this time I feel comfortable with rsync, which I use to sync my home
to an external Usb drive. No automation, no scheduling for now. I just
launch rsync from the command line and let it backup all the stuff when
I need it.

Now I'd like to move to more powerful utility. It should be reliable and
very user-friendly. A friend on Irc suggested me borg [1], which also
feature decuplication, encryption and seems easy enough to use.

Otherwise I discovered a scripting hot-to to make some kind of snapshots
via rsync (and hardlinking) [2], but I haven't tryed it out yet.

So... What's your opinion about user-oriented backup tools? ^^

Thanks in advance.

[1] https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
[2] http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

-- 
fp
pgp: 0x45399C26



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