Re: Backup/Restore software?
----- Original Message -----
> From: "David Guntner" <david@guntner.com>
>
> 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. :-)
>
I use backuppc and I really like it. It's especially good when you're
backing up multiple machines, because it does file pooling -- it will
only save 1 copy of a file, no matter how many machines or directories
it appears in. (It uses hard links to achieve this). It also does
compression.
While it's not super-easy to set up, it's got a web interface for
managing everything. You just need to learn a little bit about how it
works, because there are lots of options.
In another post you stated that you wanted to be able to restore an
entire system. Just keep in mind that there are things like /dev,
/proc, and the mbr that you will need to work around. It's not quite
as simple as backing up everything and then restoring everything.
My preferred recovery method is to install the OS from scratch, then
install all of my packages using dpkg --set-selections < mypackagelist
(see this page: http://askubuntu.com/questions/101931/restoring-all-data-and-dependencies-from-dpkg-set-selections)
Then restore all my config files, /usr/local, /home, and so-on.
-Rob
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