On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 3:19 PM, Keith Roberts keith@karsites.net wrote:
Just a knee-jerk reaction because I like it so well, but whenever anyone mentions backups I have to recommend backuppc. If you have any other system that can work over the network (perhaps offsite via VPN) and hold copies on-line you might like it. It is the kind of thing that you can set up once and it will take care of itself for years. It can use rsync for the transport so after your initial copy you only need bandwidth for the changes.
That's something I might take a look at. What I want to do is make backups that are on removable media, so they are not dependant on a machine for their data safety. Once I have burnt the backups to DVD they will be stored away then, just in case I need them.
Backuppc has an option to do something like that out of the backup copies (extract the equivalent of a tar, compressed and split to files that will fit on your backup media) but it is sort of an afterthought. The real focus is on keeping a history of backups online stored in a very efficient form so you can keep much more than you would expect online and available in a given amount of disk space. It is much easier to use its web interface to pick a file from last month to restore than to have to extract it from some huge old tar files on dvds.