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Re: Backup/Restore software?



Hi David,

Am Donnerstag, 11. Juli 2013, 17:42:27 schrieb David Guntner:
> 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.

That sounds like an image based backup for quick disaster recovery. Solutions 
that may be applicable for this (untested):

- partclone

- Clonezilla

- mondorescue, I see no official Debian package for this but I think there has 
been one at a time
  - see http://www.mondorescue.org/

- Relax and Recover, no Debian package, we looked at it once, sounded 
promising
  - see http://relax-and-recover.org/


And more raw / low level:

- ntfsclone for Windows, I backup an old Windows 2000 installation on an 
ThinkPad T23 from the Debian installed on the same disk. I was able to move it 
to a different harddisk this way.

- xfscopy for XFS

- xfsdump, dump for XFS / Ext3 / Ext4


Likely there are others around.

My issue with backup software that runs on Linux is:

There are so many solutions that I can easily spend a week or more to evaluate 
and compare them all. You already got a lot of suggestions for file-based 
approaches.

> 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 don´t use any of these. I just use, a script with stuff like:

# /home
echo "Sichere \"/home\"..."
mkdir -p $DEST/home
time rsync -a --acls --xattrs --sparse --hard-links --del --delete-excluded --
exclude-from "home-exclude" /home/ $DEST/home
touch $DEST/home

# /home2
echo "Sichere \"/home2\"..."
mkdir -p $DEST/home2
time rsync -a --acls --xattrs --sparse --hard-links --del /home2/ $DEST/home2
touch $DEST/home2

# /boot (Debian)
echo "Sichere \"/boot\"..."
mkdir -p $DEST/boot
time rsync -a --acls --xattrs --sparse --hard-links --del /boot/ $DEST/boot
touch $DEST/boot

# Partitionierung
echo "Sichere Partitionierung..."
sfdisk -d /dev/sda > /root/sfdisk.dump
parted -l > /root/parted-l.txt

# LVM-Metadaten
echo "Sichere LVM-Metadaten..."
vgcfgbackup

# / (Debian)
echo "Sichere \"/\"..."
mkdir -p $DEST/debian
time rsync -a --acls --xattrs --sparse --hard-links --del --delete-excluded --
exclude-from "debian-exclude" / $DEST/debian
touch $DEST/debian


Where debian-exclude is:

/dev/**
/proc/**
/sys/**
/tmp/**
/var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb
/var/tmp/**
/home/**
/media/**
/mnt/*/**


And home-exclude is just the mount point of a ecryptfs that I do not want to 
be backuped in its unencrypted state :)


This doesn´t completely cut it for my KDE desktop, so I currently manually do 
a:

- akonadictl stop
- halt nepomuk indexing
- end Firefox, Digikam, Amarok and other database using software

hope for the best.


I use this together with BTRFS on a 2 TB eSATA harddisk and another I think 1 
TB eSATA disk at another location and

btrfs subvol snap -r merkaba merkaba-2013-08-04

;)


I can´t remember any significant data loss within last ten years or more since 
using that approach. I didn´t have BTRFS initially, and didn´t have snapshots 
back then, if you want those without using BTRFS, for which I recommend recent 
Wheezy backport kernels or later, use rsnapshot or some other solution like 
this.


In the rare care of desaster recovery I do it manually with GRML:

- partition and lvm new disk
- mount as per my layout
- rsync -aAHXS from backup disk
- bind mounts for /proc, /sys, /dev, /dev/pts
- chroot my to restore directory
- grub-install /dev/mydisk
- reboot into new system


It involves more manual steps, but I can easily reconfigure disk layout to what 
I like best at the time of a restore. And I can do partially steps easily as 
well. Just OS partitition gone? Redo just this one. Just /home gone? Redo just 
this one.

Some of the image based tools I think can do some relayouting of disk during 
restore, but I am not sure whether any solution provides this kind of 
flexibility I have with my approach.


I think you can also go with a image based solution plus some of the other 
suggested solutions for backuping user data. I wouldn´t feel very comfortable 
to just relay on an image based solution for user data, but I just don´t 
really seem to need an image based solution.

Ciao,
-- 
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA  B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7

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