Re: What tool can I use to make efficient incremental backups?
On Sun, Aug 20, 2017 at 6:05 AM, Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> wrote:
> Amanda has quite intelligent ways to do that. I run it nightly and have
> been since the late 90's. Storage in my case is in what are called
> v-tapes, which in fact are directories on a separate, terrabyte drive.
> However, unlike tapes which are time burning sequential reading devices,
> the terrabyte drive is true random access, so recovery operations are
> about 1000x faster than real tapes. Not to mention the terrabyte drive
> is about 1000 times more dependable than tape can ever be.
Amanda is a very well done collection of programs.
It very efficiently does incremental backups to several types of media
-- Gene goes to disk, I go to tape (takes forever, but there are
several little boxes containing backups that are nowhere near a
failure point).
It backs up in tar (or dump) files so you can restore data when the
program and all its data files have been lost (been there, and it
works). There's a program that will scan through a tape, tell you
what's on that tape, then fetch your selection(s) for you.
For me, the big drawback to Amanda was the initial configuration. It's
huge and complex (at least it was a couple decades ago). But after
it's all done, a cron job will run your backup(s) every night, while
you sleep, with no problems. If you ask it to, it'll even verify the
backup for you (an unverified backup isn't a backup, as they say).
Take a look. It's worth the trouble.
--
Glenn English
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