Comments on: Search for Backup Tools

By: Theo Band

Theo Band — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 18:04:09 +0000

Dump and restore is what I have used for several years without any problem. All data resides on a ext3 filesystem. Dump creates full compressed backups and can also make increment backups. Before I dump the filesystem, I first make a snapshot using LVM to have a consistent state of the filesystem during the backup. I am now playing with rdiff-backup. Advantage is that data can be quickly found and retrieved, which is more cumbersome with the compressed dumps.

By: Alec Berryman

Alec Berryman — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 02:19:44 +0000

I’ve been looking around for an alternative to rsnapshot. I think that gibak is promising – http://eigenclass.org/hiki/gibak-backup-system-introduction.

It’s based on git, appears to get all the metadata issues right, stores no uncompressed copies (just use a bare repository). It doesn’t do compression, but you can use encfs or something similar for that.

The downside is that it’s rough and inflexible. I think it will take a nontrivial amount of work to have it do daily/weekly/monthly schemes, expire content, not just backup the home directory, and other important features.

By: toupeira

toupeira — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 12:21:05 +0000

I’m aware how ZFS snapshots work, and they *can* be restored. We’re planning to still have 3 separate systems and replicate the data, using zfs send/receive as thedward mentioned.

By: Kai Hendry

Kai Hendry — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 11:23:21 +0000

I stole some ideas from Stuart Langridge. Here are the backup scripts I use at work. Ok, it doesn't use compression for storage, though disk space is cheap and I'd rather have fast non-CPU intensive backup runs.

By: Miek Gieben

Miek Gieben — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 08:42:27 +0000

Hi,

I’m the author of rdup and rdup DOES support hardlinks as of version 0.6.0. This ofcourse only works when the hardlinked files are all contained in your
backup.

By: solrize

solrize — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 01:20:48 +0000

I just use tar and/or rsync, but have been wanting to look at veracity:

http://taobackup.org

By: ramune

ramune — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 21:33:09 +0000

There’s also Bacula. We currently use it at work and it supports restoring hard links, manages pools of media, can auto-label tapes, back up to files (ala VTL), and so on.

The main gripe I have is the user interface. It’s pretty much unusable without running under rlfe. Despite that, though, I found its features and reliability good enogh to stick with, despite the klunky interface.

It is lacking a bit in configuration options and tweaks compared to commercial products, but I found it more reliable than any other open-source backup software out there.

By: chris burkhardt

chris burkhardt — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 20:39:00 +0000

Oh, I just read the other entry you referenced and see you’ve already considered and rejected duplicity.

By: chris burkhardt

chris burkhardt — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 20:34:37 +0000

duplicity is by the same author as rdiffbackup, but instead of keeping a mirror of the current state, everything is tar’d and gpg’d:

[url=http://duplicity.nongnu.org/]http://duplicity.nongnu.org/[/url]

By: thedward

thedward — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 19:46:01 +0000

One of the neat things about ZFS is zfs send / zfs receive; You can serialize and deserialize snapshots or diffs between snapshots. It makes it easy to synchronize your local snapshots with a remote system.

By: Michael Alan Dorman

Michael Alan Dorman — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 19:30:27 +0000

John,

I think your nervousness over BackupPC may be unwarranted.

Looking at the code, what it’s producing is simply headerless gzip compression—anything that provides an interface to zlib should be able to chew on it.

The allowances it’s making for memory usage issues would appear to have no more impact than perhaps lowering the compression level by flushing excessively.

Oh, and it appears it appends a record of rsync meta-information that is presumably there to allow it to avoid unnecessary transfers without having to decompress unchanged files.

Honestly, I might look at using it for myself

By: alex

alex — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 19:23:33 +0000

rdiff-backup on a compressed FS?

By: stlman

stlman — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 18:58:57 +0000

Tell me Mr. Toupeira, what good is a backup when you’re unable to restore it?

Snapshots are not backups they’re just checkpoints which prevent overwriting blocks “created” before the checkpoint. If some data in such block are to be updated copy-on-write is performed hence the instantaneousness. Snapshot are very useful for backups because you get consistent, even on application level, filesystem state. But they are NOT in any way safer than the data you work with. They are on the same hardware.

By: toupeira

toupeira — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 18:36:39 +0000

At my workplace we’re also using rdiff-backup to manage almost 3TB now, and rsync to replicate the backups to other, identical systems. But currently we’re considering moving everything to a central OpenSolaris storage system, and just do backups using ZFS’ snapshots, which are basically instantaneous.

By: stlman

stlman — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 18:28:46 +0000

There is a perl script called flexbackup. It is very good and… flexible :-) It supports many archivers and compressors and adding your own isn’t too hard either.
However, it hasn’t been developed for few years, there isn’t anything it lacked for me.

I converted to rsync(1) incremental backup with hard links because it was quite annoying to search for files in eg. 20GiB bzipped tar. (3 MB/s)

http://freshmeat.net/projects/flexbackup/

By: Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 18:21:48 +0000

Write a script that decompresses the backup, run rdiff-backup, and compress again.

I have done similar things and it works perfectly (and let’s hope Murphy doesn’t get involved if I need the backup :-) )