I need a good backup program.

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 09:24:08PM -0800, Robert Swanson wrote:
> 	I prefer to store my data at home, so I use rsync.  I do two backups to
> separate drives and that gives me what I consider to be a reliable,
> flexible, and easily restorable system.  Here is one link that describes
> how to.
>   https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Full_System_Backup_with_rsync

Ditto, after an ill-advised experiment with duplicity (which I decided
was entirely unsuitable for full-system backups).  I actually use a
reasonably sophisticated wrapper tool written by a friend of mine, but
it's still rsync under the hood:

  http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/rsbackup/

There are at least two things that this does notably better than the
Arch instructions linked above.  Firstly, rsbackup manages multiple
versions of the backup, using rsync's --link-dest option to share most
of the storage cost among the versions by way of hardlinks.  This gives
me the benefits of multiple versions - I can retrieve something if I
realised I deleted it a couple of days ago and shouldn't have done, I
can recover even if the most recent backup was while the system was
active and so some files are inconsistent, etc. - without any of the
hassle of managing full and incremental backups in the old-fashioned
way.

Secondly, the Arch instructions don't use rsync --numeric-ids, which is
a terrible mistake for full-system backups.  I learned that the hard way
with duplicity (although that was only one of its flaws).  Restoring
from an rsync backup without --numeric-ids on both ends will almost
certainly corrupt the system in subtle and awkward-to-fix ways, because
(in particular) IDs in the dynamic system range are unlikely to match up
between your real system and the live CD instance or whatever that
you're using for recovery purposes, even if they're from the same
version of Ubuntu; it will mostly work, and you *can* generally recover
with some manual attention if you know what you're doing, but it's
really not what you want in the already stressful situation of having to
restore from a backup.  Use --numeric-ids both for your backup and when
restoring.

Still, the important thing is to have it all automated so that you don't
have to remember to do your backups!

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]