[CentOS] Backups on external USB HDD

Tue Nov 20 12:22:59 UTC 2007
Dag Wieers <dag at centos.org>

On Tue, 20 Nov 2007, Ugo Bellavance wrote:

> 	I'm trying to implement this:
>
> I have:
>
> - A windows 2000 server
> - A centos 4 server
> - Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Monthly.
>
> The tape drive in the windows server died recently and I decided to switch to
> USB external drives.  However, the USB controller in the windows server is
> only 1.1, so it is very slow.
>
> I didn't want to install a 2.0 USB controller in the windows server since it
> is a brand-name and I didn't want to make it unstable, so I decided to make
> the backups of the windows server (using Backup Exec) on the linux box.
>
> So backup exec writes on the linux box via samba, directly on the USB drive.
> (I thought of writing on the linux box FS directly, then rsync'ing to the USB
> drive), but the space available on the local FS is about 90 gigs while the
> external USB drives are 250 gigs, meaning that I can keep like 4 weeks of data
> on the USB drives (using backup exec settings), while I could only keep 1 or 2
> weeks otherwise.
>
> My questions is:
>
> -how can the USB drives be umounted/mounted automatically when the person on
> site changes it (monday to tuesday, for example).  There will always be only
> one HDD conected at the time.

This is a very good question. I always wanted a system like this:

 - A program is hooked into the system's messagebus (dbus)
 - It understands when a certain USB disk is attached that this is a
   backup disk (either based on ID or media name or something else)
 - When the disk is connected, it wil automatically trigger an rsnapshot
   backup with the current timestamp
 - After it has finished it displays a graphical pop-up (or a wall message
   to all consoles) that the backup is finished and the disk can be
   unplugged.

I am looking for a tool that can do this (both on Windows and on Linux).
If such a tool exists in Open Source it would making backups very easy for
companies or my mom and dad. (It is up to them in what frequency they make
the backup, the default policy however is pretty broad)

-- 
--   dag wieers,  dag at centos.org,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
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