On Dec 17, 2007, at 9:37 PM, Brian wrote:
This whole thread is making me feel ok with rsync to a separate drive, or tar and gzip what you care about.
If you have an external drive and want something better than just rsync, I highly recommend rdiff-backup (http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/ ). It solves every one of the issues listed in this thread, and is extremely space efficient. There is no concept of an "incremental" backup - it runs in full every day, but only stores the changed bytes of each file.
1) It knows what was deleted when and will respect that deletion upon restore. 2) Since it's always comparing against another full copy of the filesystem, it will catch moved files and directories. 3) There is *always* a valid full set of backup data, so power interruption will only corrupt the running backup. Upon next execution, it will recognize the failure and roll the repository back to the previous backup.
rdiff-backup is really the closest thing that Open Source has to CDP (Continuous Data Protection). Technically it's "Near" CDP and is often used as such by putting it in an hourly cron job.
-- Joshua Penix http://www.binarytribe.com Binary Tribe Linux Integration Services & Network Consulting -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
