[CentOS] XFS or EXT3 ?

[Les Mikesell]

On 12/3/2010 2:51 PM, John R Pierce wrote:
> On 12/03/10 12:25 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
>> Whenever anyone mentions backups, I like to plug the backuppc program
>> (http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/index.html and packaged in EPEL).  It
>> uses compression and hardlinks all duplicate files to keep much more
>> history than you'd expect on line with a nice web interface - and does
>> pretty much everything automatically.
>
>
> I'm curious how you backup backuppc, like for disaster recovery,
> archival, etc?   since all the files are in a giant mess of symlinks
> (for deduplication) with versioning, I'd have to assume the archive
> volume gets really messy after awhile, and further, something like that
> is pretty darn hard to make a replica of it.

The usual way is some form of image-copy of the whole drive or 
partition.  In my case I made a 3-device raid1 mirror where I regularly 
rotate one of the drives offsite letting the one coming back resync.  I 
use a SATA drive in a trayless hot-swap enclosure.  For disaster 
recovery it can by connected to my laptop - or about anything with a USB
cable adapter.

> this has kept me leery of it.

If you are really leery, you just run two independent instances, one of 
which is in another location.  It can run with rsync over ssh, so 
bandwidth needs are minimal and it pretty much takes care of itself.

It also has a way to generate tar archives from the last (or a 
specified) backup.  You can roll those off to something else 
periodically but you lose the space savings.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com