[CentOS] Simple backup program

Wed Jun 14 17:35:23 UTC 2006
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Wed, 2006-06-14 at 13:09 -0400, Bowie Bailey wrote:
> > > I am looking for a simple backup program that I can use to backup a
> > > CentOS box to a local tape drive. 

> > http://flexbackup.sf.net
> > 
> > I used that for years, but the network grew and needed a "bigger"
> > solution so I switched to backuppc which is working great.
> 
> I'm using backuppc.  I just need something to dump the backuppc
> machine to tape for an offsite or last-resort backup.  The problem is
> that backuppc is currently using 161GB (compressed) and the tapes only
> hold 40GB each, so I need something with some sort of intelligent
> tape-spanning capability.

You are going to have more trouble than that.  Backuppc will have
millions of hardlinks in that 161GB and nearly all file oriented
backup programs will take an impractical amount of time to deal
with them.  And restoring will be even worse - basically everything
ends up building a table of inode numbers and scanning it for a match
on every hardlink.

> I haven't seen flexbackup.  I'm currently evaluating afbackup.

You really want a matching external hard drive so you can
dd an image copy to it.  There has been quite a bit of discussion
on this topic on the backuppc mail list and I'm not sure anyone
has come up with an ideal solution.  Or, you can use the 'archive
host' feature of backuppc to generate tar images of backup runs
optionally compressed and split to fit your media, but these
are copies of individual hosts and you loose the pooling feature.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com