[CentOS] Backup of large filesystems >500GB

Mon May 27 18:55:55 UTC 2013
Keith Keller <kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us>

On 2013-05-27, Mike Watson <mikew at crucis.net> wrote:
> I've a small system that I use to support a number of churches. I
> provide web and email for them. My current server is running CentOS 6.3
> with paired 1TB drives in a RAID1 configuration. It works well. One
> filesystem is very large, >500GB, and contains numerous large files:
> SQL, docs, church libraries in ebook and digital form, plus stored
> videos of church services.
>
> Backup will be to an external (USB) removable HD.
>
> Can any suggest a prog or a method to back up this filesystem?

People have already suggested rsync and rdiff-backup; there's also
rsnapshot which is built on top of rsync.

Another option could be mdadm if your RAID1 is already an mdadm array.
You can add your USB drive to the array, wait for it to rebuild, then
remove it from the array.  I'd be wary of backing up an SQL database in
that way, but I'd be wary of using rsync, dump, or tar too, so be sure
to take a real backup (e.g., mysqldump, pg_dump) of your database first.

--keith

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