On Tuesday 01 July 2014 15:59:09 Thomas Harold did opine And Gene did reply:
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.
Well, I've been using amanda since 1998, and it was fairly mature then, and its always done what I wanted. I do backup to disk, but if I wanted offsite, then copying its backup and index files to an external drive offers bare metal recovery completely up to the date of the last backup the way I do it. As is, I just use a separate disk from the OS's disk as virtual tape. Works a treat.
Cheers, Gene Heskett
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