On 01/11/2013 12:54 PM zGreenfelder wrote:
On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 12:29 PM, kengebser@mousecar.com wrote:
Considering using rsync on a couple systems for backup, I was wondering if it's possible, and if so how difficult is it, to delete files which have been backed up (in order to save space on the backup media).
Anyone with experience doing this?
it's certainly feasible for a a fairly lackluster backup solution (e.g. gonna rebuild machine, want all of /home saved to other machine, rsync then reinstall to try $new ditro!) but I wouldn't recommend rsync for product grade backups; it'd get very complex very quickly trying to figure a way to do versioning (rsync would be really good for 'oops, I removed X file, but I'd copied it over to M machine, so I can recover', not very good at 'someone changed this file 4 days ago and now it doesn't do what I want, I'd like to go back to a previous version). at least in my estimation.
Thanks for your expression of caution. But, yeah, I'm looking for a solution just to back up a few LVs on this one machine. Keeping prior versions of files isn't really necessary in this particular instance. (I guess my Subject line may have been a bit misleading on that count.)
I've admin'd both extremes of the backup world, a lot of Veritas Netbackup and a lot of tar+gzip, and I prefer something which is easier to understand and so not so much the grand package with so many bells and whistles that it takes days (or longer) in the manual to set it up. From what I've read, rsync will work in the background and just fine while users (and several system processes) are copying, deleting, editing and other things which would confuse tar. Plus, it handles the network stuff. If it does all that well and the other stuff mentioned previously, I'm in.
Probably not too far into the future I'll be back to talk about a more sophisticated backup systems with versioning etc. But for right now, for the too-quickly-approaching future, simpler is going to be better.
Thanks for the input.