On 2013-05-27, Mike Watson mikew@crucis.net wrote:
I've a small system that I use to support a number of churches. I provide web and email for them. My current server is running CentOS 6.3 with paired 1TB drives in a RAID1 configuration. It works well. One filesystem is very large, >500GB, and contains numerous large files: SQL, docs, church libraries in ebook and digital form, plus stored videos of church services.
Backup will be to an external (USB) removable HD.
Can any suggest a prog or a method to back up this filesystem?
People have already suggested rsync and rdiff-backup; there's also rsnapshot which is built on top of rsync.
Another option could be mdadm if your RAID1 is already an mdadm array. You can add your USB drive to the array, wait for it to rebuild, then remove it from the array. I'd be wary of backing up an SQL database in that way, but I'd be wary of using rsync, dump, or tar too, so be sure to take a real backup (e.g., mysqldump, pg_dump) of your database first.
--keith