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NickDaFish
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 12 Sep 2002
Posts: 112
Location: Boston, USA
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 Posted: Wed Oct 02, 2002 5:54 pm Post subject: How do you backup Gentoo? |
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Hia people,
I've just been sitting here reviewing cpio, afio, tar, bu and others to try and form a backup plan..... I've got a few mySQL dbs, some webpages, user notes and a huge pile of static files (Mostly Mp3s).
So I was going to backup /etc, /home, /root, /var/mail and /storage fully once every two months and do incrementals every few days.
Being sort of new to the Linux admin thing I thought I would ask the community....
What is everyone else doing? What is your fav software? What dirs do you backup? Is it worth backing up the app binarys?
Backups are a very important part of system administration... you never know how important untill you need them  |
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delta407
Bodhisattva
Joined: 23 Apr 2002
Posts: 2876
Location: Chicago, IL
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| Posted: Wed Oct 02, 2002 6:18 pm Post subject: |
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I use my backup scripts, which I can send you if you're interested.
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I don't believe in witty sigs. |
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NickDaFish
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 12 Sep 2002
Posts: 112
Location: Boston, USA
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| Posted: Wed Oct 02, 2002 8:09 pm Post subject: |
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| delta407 wrote: | | I use my backup scripts, which I can send you if you're interested. |
Nifty, I wouldn't mind seeing them. Do you use cpio or afio? I recon that I want to write my own scripts but I'm not sure of the pros and cons of 'tar vs cpio vs afio'. Afio says that it's better than cpio, cpio says that it's better than tar and none of them really say why?!?! There is also the issue of what is widely supported. No point in having afio archives if your disaster disk can't read them! Can you fudge incremental backups with all of them? Have you seen any good docs relating to any of this?
Good resources I've found:
LinuxBackup.Net
Linux Mafia
Linux Magazine article on tar
tar vs cpio
Annother Gentoo thread |
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chatwood2
n00b
Joined: 20 Jun 2002
Posts: 39
Location: Washington DC, Pittsburgh PA
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| Posted: Wed Oct 02, 2002 10:24 pm Post subject: |
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I use rdiff-backup ( http://rdiff-backup.stanford.edu/ ).
There is an ebuild, but last I checked it was way out of date, so I built it from scratch (not hard).
In a nutshell rdiff-backup creates a up-to-date mirror of you entire hard drive (or only directories you specify) on a local drive or on a remote server. It also maintains reverse diffs that allow you to restore from any past backup (very usefull if you accidentally delete half of a document).
- Chris |
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pdouble
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 24 Aug 2002
Posts: 89
Location: USA
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| Posted: Fri Oct 11, 2002 2:23 pm Post subject: |
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I use rsync with the --backup-dir option to a server that has a lot of disk space. The --backup-dir option provides sort of an incremental backup (sorta). I like this method because I can get to any file I need to quickly and I've done probably two dozen restores by booting a rescue disk with network support, setup my partitions and boot loader, then rsync back. Everytime the restore has been successful. I use this to migrate to a new machine. I stick with laptops so I have the same machine at work, home or on the road. Never had a problem. There are some drawbacks to this method I realize, such as the amount of disk space used but IMHO the benefits outway the drawbacks. I use the following options when backing up (and similar when restoring) to preserve permissions, owner/group ids, etc.:
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rsync -e ssh --one-file-system --verbose --archive --devices --sparse --delete --numeric-ids --exclude=/dosc* --exclude=/dosd* --exclude=/tmp/* --exclude=/root/.ccache/* --exclude=/usr/portage/distfiles/* --exclude=/var/tmp/* --backup --backup-dir=[use something with a timestamp here] --progress / root@backupserver:/backup/myhost
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Note that I'm using the root user on the SSH host. This is required to preserve numeric ids and such. From a security standpoint this may not be desirable, but it works for me. I use public key authentication so I'm not entering passwords. |
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Proteus
Guru
Joined: 14 Jul 2002
Posts: 346
Location: Hamburg, Germany
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| Posted: Sun Oct 20, 2002 3:37 pm Post subject: |
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I have been using the standard tar until now - then compressing it with gzip.
Can anyone tell me the most important advantages of the other programs mentioned over my method?
I always thought that going with the basic tar command - available on almost every linux machine - I chose the safe method....
And btw: What is the difference between bzip2 and gzip??
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Greetings,
Proteus |
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P-Nuts
n00b
Joined: 15 Oct 2002
Posts: 31
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| Posted: Sun Oct 20, 2002 3:58 pm Post subject: |
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| Proteus wrote: | | And btw: What is the difference between bzip2 and gzip?? |
With bzip2, you almost always get a better compression ratio than gzip (it also beats the windows tool rar). The disadvantage is that compressing and uncompressing with bzip2 is far more expensive in terms of processing time than gzip.
I prefer bzip2, since even with a fast connection, the transfer time is far greater than the time to extract. |
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Lovechild
Advocate
Joined: 17 May 2002
Posts: 2858
Location: Århus, Denmark
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| Posted: Sun Oct 20, 2002 4:53 pm Post subject: |
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| I had this idea of making binary packages of all my stuff and then a small tarball of /etc/ stuff - that should make for a quick reinstall. |
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