[CentOS] Simple backup program

Wed Jun 14 18:40:07 UTC 2006
Robin Mordasiewicz <robin at mordasiewicz.com>

On Wed, 14 Jun 2006, Les Mikesell wrote:

> 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.
>
my .02$ is bacula
It spans tapes. fully featured, reliable, well documented etc.