Re: Backup System
I have 3 computer running on Debian Squeeze. One has an unused hard
drive that I wish to use as a backup disk for all 3 computers. Is there
a simple way to do this that can be completely automated.
I've got rdiff-backup set up on one machine, and backup ninja set up on
other machines that I want to back up, which I configure with a neat
little tool called ninjahelper. After some digging, this turned out to
be both comprehensive and simple. Things like Amanda seemed like
overkill for a small installation.
Sites for the tools:
http://rdiff-backup.nongnu.org/
https://labs.riseup.net/code/projects/show/backupninja
Debian installation is real simple:
1. on the backup machine:
apt-get install rdiff-backup
2. on the machine(s) that you want to back up:
apt-get install backupninja (and all the things it recommends, note:
includes the ninjahelper config. gui tool)
Notes:
- rdiff-backup does an incremental backup, sort of like time machine on
the Mac, pretty efficient in terms of storage, let's you go back in time
to previous versions
- Documentation on riseup.net web site is pretty good.
- Backupninja and ninjahelper know how to do a couple of other kinds of
backups as well - notably mysql, postgres, and ldap backups.
One caveat: restoring from an rdiff-backup archive is non-trivial.
There seem to be some GUIs floating around that make it easy to browse
archives and select file versions for backup, but I haven't played with
them.
One more note: I've been using this for several years, but only had to
do simple restores of the most recent copies of several files. I'm
running with RAIDed disks and a high-availabilty fail-over cluster.
(Fingers crossed...) The only times I've had to restore anything is when
I've done something stupid and deleted files by mistake.
Hope this helps,
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
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