[CentOS] Can anyone suggest a decent backup system?

Thu Sep 16 12:48:49 UTC 2010
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On 9/16/10 6:20 AM, Sorin Srbu wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On
> Behalf
>> Of Kevin Thorpe
>> Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2010 11:59 AM
>> To: CentOS mailing list
>> Subject: Re: [CentOS] Can anyone suggest a decent backup system?
>>
>> I'll definitely look into BackupPC for HDD backups but they're in the
>> same offfice and
>> don't give us the audit monthend tapes we are required to keep
> indefinitely.
>
> Given you have enough storage space, it's possible to keep a full backup
> with BackupPC indefinitely as well, *if* you set up the rentention
> parameters properly.

I ran amanda and backuppc independently for a long time. Both are pretty much 
'full automatic' once you set them up.  If your backup window is long enough 
having both means you still have backups if one or the other has some kind of 
problem or is being upgraded.  But, after years of never restoring from tapes I 
gave up on them and now have the backuppc archive on a 3-member raid1 mirror and 
swap one of the drives offsite regularly.

Tapes are kind of an afterthought with backuppc, but if you want to use it by 
itself you can use its concept of 'archive host' to write a tar copy of the last 
backup to tape (or compress/split for dvds, etc.).  This can be done through the 
web interface or you could use the command line tool that generates a tar image 
to script whatever you wanted to write to tape.  With the command line tool you 
can specify the backup you want so you'd be able to generate a 'month-end' tar 
any time before the run for that day expired.

Also, backuppc can use rsync over ssh for the transport, so once you get the 
initial copy you might be able to move the server to a remote location.

--
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com