On 7/1/2014 4:48 AM, Infoomatic wrote:
If you actually want to preserve those increments (as opposed to just keeping an rsync mirror up-to-date), I like rdiff-backup. It handles maildirs well because of the one-message-per-file design. Second that. It's great tool that keeps an actual sync (rsync-based) of the data-directory and the metadata (delta) in a seperate directory to restore data from any date.
Alternatively, you might want to take a look at bacula, which was faster in most cases (development seems to have stalled, but there is a fork I have not had time to take a look at: bareos). However, I liked the rdiff-backup way because I can restore files via scp or rsync (most of my requests were like "please restore from yesterday") or if I want to restore data from a certain date I can use rdiff-backup from command line (bacula is much more complex, and you need the admin tool to restore files - rdiff-backup works from command line locally or via ssh/keyauth)
I looked at Bacula/Amanda - which are great systems if your focus is tape or backup to disk. But neither of them had good support for "backup to disk, rsync to offsite".
rsnapshot / rdiff-backup are just better at creating backups which are rsync-friendly over the WAN. Which also means you can easily push the backups to USB drives without having to wait hours and hours.