On Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 03:27:18AM +0000, Travers Buda wrote:
> On Mon, 12 Jun 2006 10:41:55 -0700
> prad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > i've gone through the threads:
> >
> > Recommendations for an OpenBSD-based Backup Solution
> > remote data backup
> >
> > and am contemplating the ideas as they apply to my rather simple
> > setup - 2 webservers (one does email as well). not too much changes
> > on them and not a lot of stuff on them either (under 5G combined
> > including OpenBSD).
> >
> > what i've done in the past is just scp the etc and a few other
> > directories that contain data with the intention of reinstalling
> > OpenBSD and putting those directories back in (if disaster strikes).
> >
> > is this too simplistic and inefficient a solution?
> > should i be thinking of incremental backups say with dump?
> > does it make any sense to rsync the entire server drive?
>
> What Bob Beck said is all good stuff. Made me chuckle.
>
> This mostly applies to data that is changing on the box ( like e-mail
> spools ) rather than configs:
>
> My favorite solution is rsnapshot in ports. It beats rsync and scp
> because not only does it allow you to specify what and when to backup,
> but it uses hard links. What's that got to do with anything? Well it
> rsyncs everything on the first backup, and only the differences there
> after. But it makes every backup look like a full backup (every
> file) because it hard-links the unchanged stuff into the latest backup
> dir. So you get a complete backup dir every time sans lots of file
> transfers and space taken up on the backup storage box.
This is a very good thing. The downside, of course, is that it's hard to
keep the disk separate from the machines you are trying to protect.
Of course, I use AMANDA with tapes, and the tapes are just above my
computers. They are not primarily meant to safeguard *my* data, but
still...
(Most of my personal data is in a RAIDed Subversion repository of which
at least two checkouts exist at any given time, so it's not too likely
that everything fails at once.)
On a side note, AMANDA is both very good and very bad. It really only
works well with tapes, encrypting backups is possible but clunky, and it
doesn't like firewalls at all. However, aside from these problems, it
does all a backup package should do.
Joachim
