Re: Backup/Restore software?

I back up 20 or so hosts and have about the same story as Gary. As with any backup solution, I do spot-check backups on occasion, just to make sure that in your moment of need, the files are really there. :)

I use the default location of /var/lib/backuppc as my default location for my file store as well. I did have it pointed elsewhere, but there are enough extra scripts out there that get heartburn if it is not there, that it is easier to mount the pool in the default location than to go in and edit every script.

Another thing I do is to change my config.pl to use a normal user for backups, then give sudo access. I'm not fond of the backup box having unfettered root access to everything on my network.

--b

On Sat, Jul 13, 2013 at 2:01 PM, Gary Roach <gary719_list1@verizon.net> wrote:

On 07/12/2013 07:52 AM, Rob Owens wrote:

----- 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

I'm suprised that it took so long for someone to mention backuppc. I've been using it for some time and the biggest problem is forgetting its there. I set mine up to backup 3 systems, all debian wheezy and used rsyncd as the transport agent. You can include your windows system as well. One of the trickiest parts is telling backuppc where to store the data. The best scheme is to set up backuppc to store the backup data in /var/backuppc and then mount your backup disk to /var/backuppc. If you do this don't do what I did and forget to exclude /var/backuppc from the backup list. You get very strange results.

Gary R.

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