[CentOS] Centos backup tools

[Les Mikesell]

On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 3:14 PM, Keith Keller
<kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us> wrote:
> On 2014-05-16, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> The most unique thing about backuppc is that it has its own
>> implementation of rsync that can work with the compressed archive
>> files on the server and a stock remote rsync version accessing the
>> target files.   Or, it can use tar or samba to transfer the files,
>> with all duplicate files pooled regardless of the location or transfer
>> method.  And it has a nice web interface for
>> configuration/browsing/restores.
>
> One thing I really like about rsnapshot is that you can take the latest
> snapshot and almost literally drop it in to replace the original.  This
> is appealing to me if, for example, the mobo on the main fileserver
> dies; I can simply change IP addresses, run the right daemons, and my
> users are back up without too much data loss and without having to wait
> a long time for a restore process.  Is this possible with backuppc?  I
> don't know enough about how the backend data store is organized to know
> if this is a reasonable use case.

The internal storage format on the backuppc server is compressed files
with slightly munged filenames so you can't quite use them 'as is' or
use the usual tools to copy them back out.    However, there is a web
browser view of the backups where you simply select the
backup/directory/file(s) you want and can either restore them back
where they came from (or to some other configured target) or download
to the browser (single file or tar/zip archive).   And there are
command line tools to generate tar/zip images if you prefer or want to
use an ssh pipeline.

So, you do have to wait for a restore to get usable files but the
process is convenient and the tradeoff is that the same disk space can
hold a much longer history (or more targets)  due to the compression
and pooling of duplicate content matched in different locations.    If
you anticipate needing an instant replacement you might want a
separate disk kept current with rsync and use backuppc for those cases
where something is accidentally deleted and you don't notice for
weeks.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com