On Tue, 2007-04-24 at 05:40 +0800, jan gestre wrote: > i found a rsync backup script that will perform a 7 day incremental > backup of the /home directory but the example is based on a remote > server,. my scenario is that the /home directory will be backed up > using an external hard drive attached to the local machine.
I like rdiff-backup. Ian sison likes rsnapshot. Those are certainly more feature-full than your backup script. There's some complexity with respect to including and excluding directories to backup. The kde program "keep" is a front-end to rdiff-backup and can make its setup a bit easier. There is probably a frontend to rsnapshot, but I wouldn't know what that is since I don't use it. I don't use keep either, since I just hand-edited my include-exclude filepatterns file, but I noticed it in a search on synaptic for rdiff-backup :-). Both rdiff-backup and rsnapshot are better than just rsync based backups because they only store rsync diffs for the increments. Thus, if you have a large file and you edit only one byte in it, rsync will store the file twice. rdiff-backup and rsnapshot will store the file once, and the one byte diff (with some overhead, of course) once. One disadvantage of rdiff-backup (probably rsnapshot too) is that you can't restore a random file (as far as I can tell, it might be possible, but I don't see it). You have to restore either the directory the file was in, or the whole incremental snapshot. That can take a lot of space (1X to store the original data, ~1X for the increment). then you can copy the file you need from the increment and remove the increment that's sitting on your temporary disk space. Tedious, but I think worth the trouble. OTOH, if it *is* possible to restore a single file from a given past increment, it'd be great if someone were to point out how :-). > i already formatted this drive and named the partition /backup, > however i did not auto mount it using fstab, is it advisable to auto > mount it? the following is the copy of the script i found and as you > can see i already made some editing but i don't know if it will work > or not, particularly on the rsync portion try out rdiff-backup and keep. rdiff-backup can go over ssh or rsh if you need to backup between servers. Of course it also works very well locally. tiger _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
