I've been using rsync for a couple of years to handle my backing up. I
wrote a script based off this one[1]!
The --link-dest hard linking feature is absolutely great, I keep my
server and desktop machines backed up to an external usb disk. It's
fantastic as I have 7 days of backup (my external hard disk isn't very
big) for both my server and desktop. I was using 30 days, but that
proved a bit too much.
You have to take into consideration how much change there will be on the
filesystem/dir struct you're going to back up. If there's a lot of
change then having many snapshots takes a lot of space, otherwise if
you're just changing the odd text file/word doc or whatever it's fab...
Can't recommend it enough! Because of the hard linking you also save on
transferring everything every time you backup, so it's quick most of the
time.
</blather>
John.
p.s - Remember to use --dry-run before you do anything you might regret!
[1]
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/
On Thu, 2008-02-21 at 23:26 +0000, john lewis wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Feb 2008 22:27:50 +0000
> alan c <aeclist@???> wrote:
>
> > I think rsync and its derivatives respect differences
> >
> > I have not looked far but rsync is basically command line so may
> > take a bit of getting used to.
>
> I too use rsync for keeping my main system and my laptop in sync with
> my dataserver, or rather the bit of the server that holds my data.
>
> It is a command line tool so may seem strange to someone coming from
> windows. But I use the command line history function so as to be able
> to repeat the command each time I need it. I also run the command as
> root as I found using rsync as an ordinary user led to errors the
> copied data, some of which is in binary format.
>
> the command I use is simply (where landing is the host name of my
> data server box)
>
> rsync -avz landing:/var/lib/geneweb/ /var/lib/geneweb
>
> I'll leave you to look at the man page for an explanation of what this
> does.
>
> --
> John Lewis
> Debian (Sid) & the GeneWeb genealogical data server
>
--
John Hunt - johnrhunt@???
http://john-hunt.com/
