[clue-admin] Backups

[Jed S. Baer]

We've talked a bit about backups at the admin meetings, and a suggestion
was that perhaps a couple of people could implement offsite backups using
rsync over ssh. Well, I was at the library a few days ago, and was looking
the TOC of a book on Linux, when the heading "Using rsync over ssh" jumped
out at me. Since I'm on dialup, it's completely impractical for me to test
this. But, here's a probably command line.

rsync -ave ssh --delete www.cluedenver.org:/tux2/backups/
/your/clue/backup/directory/

I guess there'd need to be another switch in there to identify the
username you'd be using to connect to the CLUE server. Hmmm, the command
line on the rsync manpage looks different. Perhaps a couple of you folks
on high-speed connections could test things out here?

Also, right now the --delete switch would be meaningless, since it doesn't
appear that old backups are being deleted. Can we add the backup directory
to logrotate so that old backups get compressed, and *really* old backups
get deleted? Or just compress the backups when they're produced, but still
have logrotate delete anything older than .... I dunno, do we need to keep
more than 4?

Also, in order for an offiste backup via rsync of our backup directory to
work, the ownership and/or permissions on the backup files would have to
change. Right now, they're readable only by root. Maybe we could create a
group, e.g. "rbackup", to which the people doing rsync would be added, and
the backup files could belong to root:rbackup, with group read permission.

jed
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