Anyone recommend a good backup utility for Gentoo?

[eddieparker]

Hey!

As the subject says, I'm looking for a good utility that can be my backup solution for Gentoo.

Things I'm looking to backup are:

- Blogs (wordpress driven: I'd survive if the 'backup' consists of MySQL dumps & tar -cjvf's of the blog directory)
- Subversion repos
- Configuration files (/etc, /etc/conf.d?)

Not sure if there's anything else I'm forgetting, but it'll come to me if so.

What I'm looking for in this tool is something that can run nightly and keep the last X copies of my data backed up (where I imagine X would be 10. ).

Anyhow, further opinions on backup strategies would be welcomed too!

Thanks!

[elgato319]

I'm using app-backup/rsnapshot to backup /etc, /home and /var.

mySQL Databases are dumped and zipped regularly.

[treffer]

Did you consider lvm snapshots, mounting the snapshot and tar/gzip or tar/bzip2 the fs?
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[pdr]

I'm another rsnapshot user..

[newtonian]

I'm very happy with rsnapshot on gentoo too.

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Backup
http://www.rsnapshot.org/howto/1.2/rsnapshot-HOWTO.en.html

The only downside is having to allow root access over ssh. There are a few work arounds like restricting ssh access to only ip ranges that you know of. On the upside you can have hourly, daily and monthly backups in the same amount of space or less than the 10 separate backups that you refer to in your original post. rsnapshot does an efficient job backing regular files on the file system. Not quite as efficient with mysql and svn dumps. If you can sync your mysql and svn files in your backups without doing the dumps you may be able to increase efficiency in your backups.

Cheers,

[hunky]

another thought if you have any databases running is if your backup script also does a mysql (or whatever) dump, since you need something like that to backup databases that are running, I think...

[edit] Oops - I see newtonian already addressed that, sort of.

[treffer]

[Rad]

I currently use Bacula for similar backups.

It is more complex, but also more capable if you have elevated needs, such as protection against corrupted backups, mixed backup media and locations (which at times may not be present), space usage quota...

[Kysen]

Check out flyback, its in the early stages but seems to be a promising GUI front end for rsync, that is if your looking for a GUI. They are trying to mimic timemachine on the new OSX. Or if you are looking for a command line setup check out this rsync tutorial called Time Machine for every Unix out there

[chix4mat]

Assuming you are familiar with the console, writing your own scripts should be easy, especially for what you want to do. I personally have a few different scripts that run each night and back up to a different drive and also my NAS box. The benefits of writing your own scripts is that you know exactly what's going on and are more familiar with what's happening.
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[Aleksi Halkola]

I make inceremental backups regularly using dar. There is also a gui for it called kdar which can be handy if only few file needs to be recovered. I once had to use it when my harddrive broke. Worked beautifully .

[Non_E]

I use rdiff-backup. It works flawlessly and saved my data several times.
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[kernelOfTruth]

[jtp755]

Id like to know if you can extract specific files as well...

Say you backup a whole partition and over write a file a week later and need to replace that file.
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[Aleksi Halkola]

One can in principle restore also single files. I just tried though and get a message

KDarController::restoreArchive(): need to implement

with the kdar version I have ( 3_pre20060314). So that doesn't look too good. I'm pretty sure it worked fine on the older version.

Using dar directly works of course, you just needs to know when the file was last modified so that you can take it from the correct archive. There is a program called dar_manager which should be able to keep track which archive has the latest version of a given file but I haven't used that...

[newtonian]