Michael A. Peters wrote:
>
>> I'd recommend looking at backuppc instead of amanda if you mostly want
>> on-line storage. Its storage scheme will hold a much longer history in
>> the same amount of space and it has a handy web interface for browsing
>> and restores.
>
> I'd rather have something that has a client side daemon that just does
> it w/o users needing to initiate it.
Backuppc is as fully-automatic as it gets - and it doesn't need a client
side daemon. It has options to use smb (for windows shares), tar over
ssh, rsync over ssh, or rsync in standalone daemon mode (solves some
windows problems) to collect the data. Rsync over ssh is usually the
best approach where possible since that detects new files with old
timestamps, deletions, and old files under renamed directories in
incremental runs.
> I'm not worried about longer history, anything I do I need history on I
> already do with svn.
It is tunable. But it compresses files and pools all instances of files
with identical content with hardlinks (whether from previous runs on the
same target or from different machines) so only new/changed files take
up more space over time.
But the big difference vs. amanda (which is also pretty self-sufficient
once installed) is when you want to restore a file. With backuppc you
can use the web interface to find the version you want and download it
directly through the browser (or a zip/tar of several files/directories)
or specify where you want it restored. There are command line tools
also, of course, but you'd probably only use them to generate a complete
tar image to rebuild a machine.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com