On 11/07/13 08:42 PM, David Guntner wrote:
I've been religiously backing up my Windows machine for years with a
program called Acronis True Image. It works well, lets me backup my
system to a second hard drive in the computer, and will do a weekly full
backup and daily incremental backups, cleaning up older backup chains
and so on.
My Linux machine (Debian 6.0.7 at the moment, but planning on updating
to Wheezy soon), on the other hand, has gone far too long without any
real backup protection. I'd like to rectify that if I can. :-)
Is there a Linux backup package that will do pretty much what I
described above? I want to be able to set it and forget it so it just
runs every night on its own and that way I have about a week or two's
worth of backups to fall back on. I need it to be able to do a full
restore in case of a disaster as well as being able to restore selected
files/directories in case of a "oh why did I rm *that*?" moment. :-)
Any suggestions?
--Dave
Bacula. It backs up whatever you want it to however you want it to.It's not as simple as some, but if you want a coprehensive backup solution, it's hard to beat. Bacula has some pretty good job definitions set up by default to do, for example, a weekly full backup and nightly incrementals with backups going back as far as you want.
I use it to back up home directories and some shared Windows files kept on another machine. Bacula works well in mixed environments.
On the other hand, to do a full system backup to a second drive, try dd. Something as simple as a cron job to do
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1M will do the copy quickly and effectively.However, you may also want to consider software raid (mdadm). Use your two drives in a RAID 1 array so that a single drive failure won't shut you down. Use this in conjunction with bacula to avoid the "why did I rm that" problem and you should be unstoppable.
RAID 1 also leads to faster reads.