[CentOS] Centos backup tools

Fri May 16 16:08:07 UTC 2014
Bowie Bailey <Bowie_Bailey at BUC.com>

On 5/16/2014 10:58 AM, Fred Smith wrote:
> Hi all!
>
> I'm building a raid box to use for backups, connectivity will be either
> USB3 or esata.
>
> Looking for suggestions on backup software I can use.
>
> I know there's rsync, which may be a good solution. I also find backupPC
> at epel, backintime also at epel, kbackup.
>
> DejaDup looks interesting, but none of the repos I'm set up to use
> shows it being available.
>
> some small details: I plan to use this to keep backups of my centos
> desktop, which has two 320GB drives in linux RAID-1. The backup box will
> have two 1TB drives, also in RAID-1. It will be a two drive enclosure
> with PS and cooling, with USB3 or esata, but not networking.
>
> I was thinking that it would be nice to have a full backup followed by
> a set of incrementals, and software that allows access to the state of
> the system for any specific date (similar to a source control system),
> but it may be that nothing free and/or uncomplicated will offer such
> a feature.

BackupPC works great.  I'm using it to back up about 20 servers. The 
pooling allows you to keep many more backups online than you expect.

A couple of things to watch for:

1) The data directory must be on a filesystem that supports hardlinks as 
that is how the pooling is done.

2) Due to the massive number of hardlinks used in the pool, it can be 
very difficult to backup or copy the backup server itself depending on 
the number of files in the pool.  If you want an offsite copy, I would 
suggest breaking the mirrored pair, sending one of those disks offsite, 
and then rebuilding to a new drive.  I actually have 3 drives in my 
raid1 setup so that there is still redundancy while it is rebuilding.

-- 
Bowie