[ILUG] Archival backup using rsync

[Kevin Philp]

Niall,
We use the rsync script below to make hourly backups of our critical documents 
tree to a separate hard drive. Each hour we generate a new backup and export 
it back out to users as readonly on nfs so they can recover their own files 
they delete by accident etc. We have a similar script which backs up more 
each night and keeps 10 days worth of incremental backups.

What can I say.... its has been working for about 18 months with no problems 
although I found getting the syntax right for excluding directories a bit 
baffling (thats probably me being thick!). Its very fast. 

The script is based on the notes in: 

http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

There is also a good reference list to other projects based on the same idea 
on that site.


cd /backup
rm -rf 9hour
mv 8hour 9hour
mv 7hour 8hour
mv 6hour 7hour
mv 5hour 6hour
mv 4hour 5hour
mv 3hour 4hour
mv 2hour 3hour
cp -al 1hour 2hour
rsync -a --delete /home/cybercolloids/Documents/ /backup/1hour/


Kevin.


On Friday 24 September 2004 01:36, Niall O Broin wrote:
I'm a fan of amanda and I use it for daily backups but I now want to set up
soemthing for offsite and archival backups and I don't think amanda is the
best solution. The backup media will be large hard disks which are
periodically taken offsite, and the way to do this with amanda would be to
force backups at level 0 each time you did an archival run.

However, I would like to be able to maintain as many generations of backup on
each disk as possible. In the nature of things much of the data from one
archival backup to the next will remain unchanged. To that end there are a
few projects (I could only find one now - bontmia - but I know I have read of
others before) which use rsync with some scripting to maintain multiple
generations of backups on a disk, where any files which don't vary from
backup_n to backup_n+1 are in fact not saved in backup_n+1 but are instead
replaced by hard links to the corresponding file in backup_n. The advantage
of this is both that it saves disk space, and that is more convenient to use
for restore than amanda.

So the question is - do any of you have any experience with any of these
tools, and what do you think of them?


--
Niall