[CentOS] evaluating backup systems: rsync

Sat Jan 12 03:26:36 UTC 2013
Keith Keller <kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us>

On 2013-01-12, SilverTip257 <silvertip257 at gmail.com> wrote:
> You mentioned about it running with other people changing files ... it
> works ok for me.  I have gigabytes of backups that get rsynced in the early
> to late morning ... not always are backups completely finished when rsync
> scans the files.  So it picks up on it when the cronjob runs the sync a few
> hours later.

Since rsnapshot uses rsync under the hood, this strategy works for
rsnapshot as well.  The only real hiccup is if a user deletes a file
between when it's scheduled to be synced and when rsync actuall reaches
it to sync, rsync might produce a harmless error message.

> *** You may have to run rsync as root with sudo to preserve all
> permissions/ownership. ***
> At work we have it locked down in sudoers to do so.  It was a setup that
> predated my employment there, so I don't know if running it as root was
> necessary.  Using SSH keys for auth.

You can also use an OpenVPN tunnel and NFS mount with no_root_squash.
I like this method a lot because the mount can be made read-only, to
ensure that no source data ever gets accidentally clobbered.  With an
ssh key there's a risk (probably minimal, but nonzero) that a
fumblefingers might delete some data on the wrong side.

--keith

-- 
kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us