Backup software recommendations?

[nl]

I am trying to sort through the variety of backup software available in gentoo packages. I run two gentoo systems, one of which is a file server with around 5GB of data to be backed up regularly.

I've looked in the past at mondo-archive, when I ran debian, and could never get it to work quite right. When I finally got the CD's made, they wouldn't boot. I also got tired of it complaining each time I used it because I wasn't running with an initrd.

I don't mind using up 10 CD-Rs / backup since they are so cheap and I've got many. Once dvd+rw-tools is workign in gentoo (presently doesn't seem to be), I don't even mind just burning to a DVD, but even that solution won't work once I exceed 4.7 GB, and I'm pretty close now, so I need somethign that will allow me to easily create backup archives of this size and split them among several CD-Rs or DVD+/-Rs.

I don't care about the ability to boot from the backup media. If my server crashes, I can reinstall gentoo and restore all the data, which lives on separate partitions from the OS anyway - and since I will hopefully lose only one disk at a time I will hopefully not be in the position of ever having to restore the whole system unless it is lost or stolen.

Can anyone suggest what they are using and have found to be both simple to set up and reliable?

Thanks.
nl

[vdboor]

To backup data from your other server, you might want to take a look for rsync.

imho, 'tar' has always been a good backup tool. After all, it was designed for Tape ARchiving. Nowadays it's patched to use gzip for compression. Another useful command line tool is "split" to split the files.. all these tools are already installed on your gentoo system.

Since the 'split' tool is able to receive input on the standard-in, and tar is able to send the file to the standard-out, you can stream the data between these commands. This eliminates the cost of tempory files you want to split.

[nl]

Thanks. This is very helpful, and I have used this technique previously (although I did the tar first, and then the split, because I wanted to ensure that the tarfile was correctly made, and then I split the tar file, cat'd it, and diff'd to ensure everything "survived" the process.

The only problem with this approach is that you cannot easily retrieve a _specific_ file off the backup without copying all the split files to disk and cat'ing them first, and you (of course) need double the disk space to restore the system, but it does get me most of the way to where I need to be right now, which is to have some sort of backup.

Ideally I need a _real_ backup solution, one which puts a directory at the start of the first CD, and then fills CDs with individual tarfiles so that you can restore individual files or directories, but I will probably go with some sort of script similar to yours for now, at least.

Thanks.
nl

[vdboor]

nl,

I'm not really familliar with any other backup software, but there is one tiny other thing that might be usefull (from the tar manual):

[ozonator]

After thinking about this for a while in my own situation, I decided that hard drives are too cheap not to consider just using a spare drive for backup, and running rsync to do the backups. They're reliable enough (I trust them to run my systems, after all), and this could be done with a spare drive in the same machine (what I do at home), or with disk space on other machines (what I do at work, where I'm using space on three machines for reciprocal backup among all three; given the two-machine setup you describe, you could do that, too). I've been doing this for a while now, with no complaints.

The advantages are that it's fast, and best of all, it's no harder to retrieve a backed up file than it is to get a file from the original filesystem (i.e., there are no archive formats involved -- the filesystem is your archive, which should make recovery much quicker if you ever need it). It's also very simple: just a few cron jobs running a nice'd rsync, and some passwordless public key authentication for network jobs over ssh, that's all.

The drawbacks are that this may not do for offsite backup, unless you have a trusted machine a sufficient distance away that counts as 'offsite', plus sufficient bandwidth between the two. Also, this scheme doesn't provide for archiving; rsync makes things similar to an incremental backup, but the old snapshot isn't preserved (if you have enough disk space on the backup device, though, you could rotate backup locations). Finally if you want a backup that's untouchable even in the face of a security compromise -- i.e., write-once, removable media -- this won't do unless you physically remove the drive, which isn't really practical without hot-swappable drives.

You could, of course, use this scheme for day-to-day backup, and once in a while dump things to CD/DVD, which I realize leaves you with the same question you have now. Two pieces of backup software you might want to investigate, then: Amanda and Bacula. I've heard both mentioned favorably, but haven't tried them myself.

[nl]

Thanks. Copying to another disk is a good idea, and I've been doing some of that too, but it's very handy to have a backup offline just in case of disaster.

I looked at amanda - only backs up to tapes, and bacula, which is just very very complicated.

Actually, the best thing I've found is mondo, but I just haven't had success getting it to work properly. Admittedly I haven't tried under gentoo, but my experiences under debian were disappointing enough. Now, I wonder how hard it will be to write something that just tars up files into tarfiles of 600MB at a shot, rather than one big tarfile that then gets split. If I could do that, then at least files would be restorable without having to reconstruct the whole tarfile on disk first, which would help in the event of losing just one file.

nl

[J.M.I.T.]

Take a look at konserve ... it's a neat, new program for backups...
_________________
Get a life...

[yngwin]

take a look at partimage (available in portage)