This thread has been beat to death, so perhaps my $0.02 isn't so meaningful, but I wrote a set of rsync scripts in php that I've used for years to manage terabytes of backups going back years of time. It's called TINBackupBuddy and you can get it at http://www.effortlessis.com/thisisnotbackupbuddy/ - it is a set of scripts that allow you to manage and back up numerous hosts, called via cron on a regular, graceful failure basis, via rsync. It de-duplicates files that have not changed between backup sets, so depending on the churn on your servers, you can get an astonishing number of backups onto a single drive...
I've managed backups for a rather large cluster (now over 200 schools and school districts) of data automatically, on a 24 hour basis using these scripts, for years, so they really do work. And for our development team, we recover from these backups in order to replicate reported issues, so these backups are verified numerous times per day.
Get a computer with some big disks in it. (We have about 20 TB of disk space on our backups server right now) Set up TinBackupBuddy and point to the big disks, use symlinks where it makes sense. Set a few options, call bbbackup.php via cron, and you're golden. Been doing it for close to 10 years now....
Good luck!
On 01/16/2012 03:50 PM, Hugh E Cruickshank wrote:
Hi All:
We have been looking at implementing deduplication on a backup server.
From what I have been able to find the available documentation is
pretty thin. I ended up trying to install LessFS on this CentOS 5.7 box but we have now encountered problems with fuse version.
Has anyone out there been able to get LessFS running on CentOS 5.7 and can provide some pointers?
If not LessFS can you suggest an alternate deduplication software?
TIA
Regards, Hugh