Re: I uninstalled OpenMediaVault (because totally overkill for me) and replaced it with borgbackup and rsyncq
On 2 Sep 2023 00:04 +0200, from mv524@free.fr (Michel Verdier):
> rsnapshot use hard links on the backup filesystem.
More accurately, rsnapshot (which is basically a frontend to rsync)
tells rsync to do that; IIRC by passing --link-dest pointing at the
previous backup target directory.
And this is not an argument against rsnapshot/rsync; I use the
combination myself, plus a home-grown script to prune old backups
based on the amount of free space remaining on the backup disks rather
than a fixed backup count.
The one big downside of rsnapshot + rsync at least for me is that it
has no real concept of whether a backup run completed or was aborted;
the latter, for example, due to a system shutdown or out-of-memory
condition while it's running. That really shouldn't happen often or
even at all, but I've had it happen a few times over many years, and
it's a bit of a pain when it does happen because you pretty much have
to go in and delete the most recent backup and then renumber all the
previous ones to get back into a sane state on the backup target. Yes,
that can be added with another piece of a wrapper script, and I have
on occasion contemplated doing just that; but it happens sufficiently
rarely, and is noisy enough when it does happen, that it isn't really
worth the effort in my particular situation.
The biggest issue for me is ensuring that I am not dependent on
_anything_ on the backed-up system itself to start restoring that
system from a backup. In other words, enabling bare-metal restoration.
I figure that I can always download a Debian live ISO, put that on a
USB stick, set up an environment to access the (encrypted) backup
drive, set up partitions on new disks, and start copying; if I were
using backup software that uses some kind of custom format, that would
include keeping a copy of an installation package of that and whatever
else it needs for installing and running within a particular
distribution version, and making sure to specifically test that,
ideally without Internet access, so that I can get to the point of
starting to copy things back. (I figure that the boot loader is the
easy part to all this.)
--
Michael Kjörling 🔗 https://michael.kjorling.se
“Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”
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