Re: Suggestions for multilevel backup of single machine?

[Rick Thomas <rbthomas55@pobox.com>]

On Apr 11, 2009, at 9:44 AM, Tapani Tarvainen wrote:

> On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 01:47:08PM +0100, James Youngman  
> (jay@gnu.org) wrote:
>
> > (2) It would be useful to have a historic backup capability too (e.g.
> > the way the filesystem looked yesterday, last week, last month and a
> > year ago), at least for filesystems like /home.
>
> > What are good solutions for doing (2)?
>
> I'm using rsnapshot, and given what you told of your setup,
> I think you'd be happy with it, too.

I've been using rsnapshot for a couple of years now (4 "hourly"/day, 7  
"daily"/week, 4 "weekly"/month, 12 "monthly"/year, 10 "yearly", and a  
single "epoch" taken when the system was originally set up.)

It's quite robust and has saved my bacon a couple of times.

It does exactly what you are asking for and it does it automatically.

And it's a debian package:

> $ aptitude show rsnapshot
> Package: rsnapshot
> State: installed
> Automatically installed: no
> Version: 1.2.9-1
> Priority: optional
> Section: utils
> Maintainer: Simon Boulet <simon@nostalgeek.com>
> Uncompressed Size: 457k
> Depends: perl, rsync, logrotate
> Recommends: ssh
> Description: local and remote filesystem snapshot utility
>  rsnapshot is a filesystem snapshot utility. It can take incremental  
> snapshots of local and remote filesystems for any number of
>  machines. rsnapshot makes extensive use of hard links, so disk  
> space is only used when absolutely necessary.
>
>  Homepage: http://www.rsnapshot.org/
>
> Tags: admin::backup, implemented-in::perl, implemented-in::shell,  
> role::program, use::storing, works-with::file