Re: [PLUG] Offline Backup Solutions

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 11:52 AM, Sam Gleske <sam.mxracer@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Have you tried rsnapshot?  A coworker of mine currently uses it and he likes
> it.

I stumbled on it but haven't tried it yet.  It looks like rsync, but
with filled-out incrementals using hard links.  Main issue with that
is a lack of compression, which I haven't given up on yet.

Right now my current thinking is that I'll stick with Bacula for my
windows boxes and for longer-retained backups of critical server files
(more about accidental deletions and going back in time than disaster
recovery).  However, I don't plan to use Bacula as a disaster recovery
strategy for the server, because it is just way too complex to get to
a state where it can read its own files.

For mythtv video I still plan to use rsync since that is simple, I
don't care about retention at all, and compression is moot.

For everything else I'm now messing around with duplicity.  I'd tell
you how that is going but it is STILL working on my initial backup.
The main fault with it is that compression is either all or nothing,
and lzo is not an option.  That makes it CPU-bound, and
single-threaded at that.  That said, I'm testing out using it for
online backups to S3 of critical files and that seems MUCH better than
sarab/dar.  The main advantage of duplicity is that it can do partial
binary diffs using the rsync libs - so if 1 byte changes in a 1GB
file, it only stores a small diff.  Incrementals should be much
smaller as a result, and it natively supports gpg and s3 so less
scripting is needed.

Aside from the all-or-nothing compression issues, duplicity is also a
bit complex as far as the command line options go when you want to
back up multiple paths with exclusions.  Dar is much friendlier in
this regard, and you can specify files that do not get compressed (but
it still lacks lzo support and partial diffs).

So, we're getting there.  I still haven't ruled out just using rsync
for everything but online backups.  It just is really annoying to be
wasting so much space.  I'm contemplating moving to btrfs and that is
raid1-only, so using rsync for backups means that I need 3TB of disk
space to store 1 TB of data.

Rich
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