On Nov 17, 2008, at 12:02, Roy Britten wrote:
Anyone care to comment on rdiff-backup's ease of use (backing up *and* recovery), robustness, and the like?
I've used rdiff-backup extensively for years now and have found it extremely handy. Since it allows you to step back in time it is more robust than a simple rsync which might copy after some bad event happened on the source. (Before it existed the best we could do was a collection of linked rotating rsync'ed copies on the destination. rdiff-backup is much less hassle, and provides more compact storage in its reverse-diff scheme.) Restoring a single file/directory is trivial, since the destination looks like a copy of the current source. rdiff-backup can store file metadata in a separate file if the destination doesn't provide all the file system semantics that the source does, which opens up some cross-platform backup options.
I also use rdiff-backup's encrypting cousin Duplicity to back up some virtual hosts to Amazon's S3. Handy if you don't completely trust the destination server and/or want to take advantage of the built in S3 support.
-- Jim Tittsler http://www.OnJapan.net/ GPG: 0x01159DB6 Python Starship http://Starship.Python.net/crew/jwt/ Mailman IRC irc://irc.freenode.net/#mailman
