[clue-tech] Multiple system backups

[Angelo Bertolli]

I spent some time researching and testing backing up a few networked 
machines at home.  Now that I'm a little bit more familiar with how 
things work, what's out there, and what I'd probably like best, I 
thought I'd see if anyone has any experience/feedback.  The backup 
software I tried were: bacula, backuppc, rdiff-backup, and rsync.

Bacula had the advantage of allowing network backups without generating 
an ssl key since it uses its own client/server software.  However bacula 
really is geared more toward tapes and implicitly requires some kind of 
volume management or pool.  That's ok, because I figured I could enforce 
a max size of 2 GB on volumes, and then burn them from the hard drive to 
DVD.

I uninstalled bacula and tried the others because I figured that I 
didn't really want automated backups anyway.  However, none of the 
others really made it easy to divide the files up into chunks to put 
onto DVD.  I took a look around online for some DVD backup solutions, 
and I didn't really like what I saw.  Right now, I'm sort of thinking I 
want to use rsync & dump, but I'm not that familiar with dump, so I 
don't know.

What I'm trying to come up with is something that:

* is simple and straightforward, and allows me to backup only certain 
parts of the directory tree
* can be run whenever I feel like backing up all of my computers
* burns the backups to DVD (although not necessarily directly--a copy on 
my second drive is fine)
* makes restoring certain files easy

Automates backups aren't necessary, but would be nice on a weekly or 
monthly basis (of course this would be to disk and not DVD)

I don't need the ability to quickly reinstall an entire system (what do 
you call it? bare metal?)

So do you think rsync & dump is a good idea?  In particular I'm 
wondering if dump is easy to use with 1) backing up certain parts of the 
sytem, and 2) restoring certain files instead of having to restore 
everything.  Is anyone else doing backups to DVDs ?

Angelo

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