Re: Backup solutions and package tags...
* Joe Emenaker <joe@emenaker.com> [070212 04:49]:
>
> I've looked at bacula and that is *way* more than what I need.
>
> Support for incremental backups to existing sets would be nice, but only if the
> restore tool could look at the entire download set at once.
>
> What is everyone else using to backup their laptops?
I use backup2l. It is very simple and command-line driven. The
configuration to identify which files to backup could be a little more
convenient, but it couldn't be any more flexible. It uses two separate
variables that get passed as arguments to find: the first is a list of
directories to backup (must not include tests, but can include options
like -xdev), e.g. (/boot /etc /root /home -xdev); the second is a list
of tests used to exclude files, e.g. (-path "*.nobackup*" -o -name "*.o"
-o -name "*~"). The defaults are reasonable, but will need minor
tweaking for most peoples individual setups. If you are familiar with
find, you can use very complicated criteria.
Once it is set up, backups are taken daily. You should have
anacron installed so that if the daily backup would have happened while
the laptop is off, it will happen soon (5-10 min) after booting. You
can also set it to only do backups manually.
It uses a hierarchy of full, incremental, and differential backups, with
the goal of getting the best range of historical backups with a minimum
of disk space. Finding a file (or files) as it was on a certain date is
easy.
By default, the backups are .tar.gz, so you can use standard tools to
find files in the backups if you don't want to (or can't) use backup2l
to restore them. You can choose another archive form if you want.
>
> An unrelated question: When I was looking through aptitude for backup programs,
> I noticed that it now shows tags ("admin::backup", "interface::text-mode",
> etc.). It seems like a fantastic way to search for all of Debian's offerings
> for a certain task. However, I can't find any mention of how to get aptitude to
> filter based on these tags, and I also can't find how to get www.debian.org's
> package search page to let you search based on tags. How are we supposed to use
> them?
You can open Views/New Debtags Browser. You can also use ~Gtag in a
search pattern. I also recommend the package "packagesearch". The
package "aptitude-doc" can also be very helpful; it will install html
files under /usr/share/doc/aptitude/.
>
> - Joe
...Marvin
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