Lee Marzke on 27 Jul 2010 17:39:26 -0700


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Re: [PLUG] How do you backup your home PC's / Laptops?


On 07/26/2010 02:16 PM, Conor Schaefer wrote:
On Sat, Jul 17, 2010 at 1:40 PM, Brian Vagnoni <bvagnoni@v-system.net> wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: Lee Marzke

If you have other household
> members Âhow
> do you ensure the backups are done ?

----- Original Message -----

Tie them to a chair, and with a dentist drill in hand, ask them "is it safe...?"

No....that isn't how most folks do it?

IMHO, I loathe all backup solutions equally. My best advice, use the the one you hate the least.

I really hate to be this guy in the thread, but what's wrong with rsync? On computers I set up for family members, I create a cronjob that SSHs into the home server and drops it into a /dir/dir/backup/user. Authentication is based on a 4096-bit RSA key, so no user intervention is needed. For those hosting remotely, Duplicity seems like an excellent solution, and has been brought up multiple times on this list.

The problem is that it's not technically versioned, but by using a script that inserts a "date" string into the dirnames within the backup/user/ folder, you can then use a "cleanup" cronjob on the server to make sure that, say, only the most recent five backups are kept. Encryption is not a problem with family stuff, of course, so I don't bother to set Duplicity up on their machines.

Rsync only saves the latest copy of your files.

Duplicity is kind of unique. It actually does create a 'version' and implant the date/time each time an incremental
archive is run.ÂÂ So you can keep 30 days of incremental backups on your remote server with no appreciable
increase in space, and each bacup can be restore individually later.

Each time you run an duplicity incremental, all the changed files are logically concatenated together, and
then placed into small packages that are individually sent to the remote server. The feature to remove all
backups older than a certain date is also built into duplicity, so you just call this option prior to
running your backup to purge all the old files.

I've put together a wrapper for duplicity that manages all this here:
http://public.perforce.com/wiki/Dpbackup


Â
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Brian Vagnoni
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-- 
"Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion..."  - Kryptos

Lee Marzke,  lee@marzke.net   http://marzke.net/lee/
IT Consultant, VMware, VCenter, SAN storage, infrastructure, SW CM
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