Comments on: Backup Software

By: Ark

Ark — Sun, 04 May 2008 06:34:41 +0000

Good post, I like one free software [url=http://www.softsea.com/review/Karens-Replicator.html]karens replicator[/url], easy for newbie, some tool under linux should be cool.

By: ryanz

ryanz — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:48:38 +0000

Jon: Do you really need that for the entire partition? If not I would just use Subversion (or something similar) to version track a subset of the files.

John: Good point, that’s why if I did it I would use 3 disks for the mirror. That way you have a rotation where there are always at least two in your box at home and one in a safe location. If you’re really paranoid you can scale this even further say up to 8 drives in a RAID 1, allowing you to have up to 6 alternate locations.

You could also use dd to do a complete byte for byte backup, and then compress that image. That can then be wrapped in a PKCS#7 envelope.

Anyways, I think your solution is all fine and good. I just thought I’d offer some more “brute force” methods.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:54:20 +0000

The other problem is that you have a single point of failure when you have both disks at your house. Not a good thing in my book. In my setup, I have no single point of failure. The only time the two disks are at the same place is for 30 seconds in the bank vault when I swap them out, but then they’re not at the same place as my PC at home.

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 10:30:07 +0000

That doesn’t give you any incremental history, and so doesn’t protect you from “oh crap I delete this file a week ago and only just noticed”.

By: ryanz

ryanz — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:40:06 +0000

Not to take anything away from your informative post, but why not just use a mirrored RAID? You could run a software (mdadm) RAID 1, sync the disks, remove one of the disks for storage at another location, and then every so often add the disk back to the array and re-sync.

You know you have an exact copy and if one fails it’s a simple matter of just plugging the other in it’s place, buying another hard drive, and then syncing again.

Could it be this simple, or am I missing something?

By: Steve Kemp

Steve Kemp — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 19:58:28 +0000

I too recommend backuppc. I ignore the GUI, but it is very efficient at space when you’re backing up multiple hosts.

For example if you have ten copies of /bin/ls on ten machines it will only store one copy ..

By: cn

cn — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:50:17 +0000

Take a look at BackupPC as well. Has web interface, maintains logarithmic backup history, provides browse of files for restore, etc.

By: terah

terah — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 13:37:39 +0000

Cliff, I was reading this post while eating raspberry-rhubarb pie for breakfast and thought “Cliff would really love this post”. Looks like I was right! :-)

By: Floris Bruynooghe

Floris Bruynooghe — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 10:28:49 +0000

Obnam (http://braawi.org/obnam.html) looks a rather promising solution too. Although I have only played with it so far and not yet tried it in anger.

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 09:08:32 +0000

Great article! Answered a lot of questions that I had about backuping

By: cliff

cliff — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 04:37:20 +0000

John, I can’t believe how much alike we think.
I also have a computer.

By: John

John — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 04:18:28 +0000

I have used dar for a couple years now, and I am pretty happy with it. I use compression (no encryption), and have been pretty happy with the filesize, although I don’t have as much binary data as you do.

I combine dar with par2 (run par2 on the generated dar files), so hopefully par2 can repair local errors in the dar files, and then dar can locally extract the files. Without needing the whole file to be recovered.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Par2
http://parchive.sourceforge.net/