Backing up.

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 10 November 2008, Knapp wrote:
>Hello, I have been dumb for years and gotten away with it. Now I want
>to start backing up my system.
>What is the best software for this? Is there a system that backs up
>only what you say and then every week or day or whatever does an
>incremental backup perhaps linked to cron, so I don't have to think
>about it? What is the best software?
>Thanks from the backup stupid me.
>--
>Douglas E Knapp
>
>http://sf-journey-creations.wikispot.org/Front_Page

Are you able to build from a tarball?  If you are, the hands down best SW for 
the job is amanda.  I don't know how debs handle the various perms it 
requires, rpms don't do that well so its best built from source to fit your 
system.  It needs to be built as the user that is going to run it, it will 
NOT run as root for security reasons, but some pieces do need high perms to 
run, so it has to be installed by root after building it as the user.  The 
user who runs it needs to be a member of a high priv group, such as disk or 
bin.

The amanda learning curve while configuring it can be steep, but I've been 
using it since 1998, staying with current releases.  The backup scheduler in 
amanda is its strong point, you tell it how many days it has to do a full of 
everything, and it will juggle the schedule until it is achieving that, doing 
a full on a different filesystem and incrementals on the rest each nightly 
run, making best use of the available tape size.  At one point I was backing 
up a 46GB system on a 10 day cycle, to 4GB DDS2 tapes, one per night using 
gzip compression.  Every tape filled to 98 or 99 percent of its capacity.

Now, I have a big hard drive setup exclusively as virtual tapes, much more 
dependable than the DDS2's ever were.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Love -- the last of the serious diseases of childhood.