[clue] small intro and backup question

David L. Anselmi anselmi at anselmi.us
Fri Oct 14 18:38:10 MDT 2011


Nic Young wrote:
> What is the best method of backing up my data to the other hard drive? I have looked at rsync,
> BackupPC and Amanda and I am frankly confused as to which would be best to suite my needs.

If you want to use an rsync-style solution look at http://rsnapshot.org/.  It may be similar to 
dirvish but I know one smart guy who likes it.

I like rdiff-backup, which is like rsync but seems to work at the block level rather than the file 
level.  But I haven't benchmarked them to know how the two compare.  If you were to do that you 
could give a talk on it.

Also rdiff-backup just makes a backup, it doesn't do scheduling or other configuration stuff that 
rsnapshot might (be nice to make a better tool use multiple back-ends--that seems to be what 
backup-ninja does).

I think that approaches like rsync and rdiff are better than what evolved out of the tape world. 
Since that's where amanda came from, and since it seems a little complex, I'm not very interested in it.

BackupPC sounds like microsofteyness, and the web site says it's "enterprise-grade".  But it seems 
to do de-duplication, which the above don't do.  It also has a web interface that might make it 
easier to use than the others.

What I would look for is simple and reliable.  Reliability might only surface after some amount of 
use.  So decide what you want to do, pick one, and then set it up.  If it takes more than an hour to 
get what you want then pick something else (bacula is like that--you have to understand its 
architecture before you can configure it).  You might also be able to guess at the setup effort just 
by skimming the docs.

And don't forget that your backup {system,process,architecture} is only there so you can restore 
things.  Use your restore plan to drive what you want to do with your backups.  And then when your 
backups are humming along, test a restore to see if it really works like you wanted.

Dave


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