What backup software?

[Florian Diesch]

"Dotan Cohen" <dotancohen at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2008/8/11 Smoot Carl-Mitchell <smoot at tic.com>:
>> On Sun, 2008-08-10 at 19:41 -0500, Chris Mohler wrote:
>>> On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 6:19 PM, Christian <christian08 at runbox.com> wrote:
>>> > Hi all,
>>> > I am looking for a disk backup software that can backup any partition to
>>> > an image and restore it at a later time.
>>> > What backup software would you recommend?
>>> >  Many thanks,
>>> > Christian
>>>
>>> I've always just used dd:
>>>
>>> dd if=/dev/sdaX of=/path/to/file.img
>>>
>>> will copy from partition to image, where "X" is a partition number on
>>> sda.  Then:
>>>
>>> dd if=/path/to/file.img of=/dev/sdaX
>>
>> This is not generally a good idea.  If your disk has bad sectors which
>> are mapped out by the filesystem, then the dd will hang. It is better to
>> do backups at the filesystem level and not at the disk level.
>>
>> I do near line backups with rsync to a network server and keep
>> incremental copies of the filesystems using glastree which is a Perl
>> implementaion of pdumpfs.  For more traditional backups, you could use
>> the BSD dump/restore utilities.
>> --
>
> +1 for rsync. I also recommend the occasional cp of the data being
> backed up, for a "time machine" to go back to.

For a "time machine" rdiff-backup is quite nice.
  rsync-backup -r 2008-05-14 /your/backup-dir/some/file some_file
get you some/file as it has been on the given date.


   Florian
-- 
<http://www.florian-diesch.de/>
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