Image and Incremental backups

Been looking at a few different snapshot based backup programs which either use rsync or something close. I don’t want or need some amanda or arkeia type thing. What I’ve settled on now are:

rsnapshot – this one does some real magic with creating incremental snapshots of data files and its quick. I like the configuration file and what it does with the backups. Its also very fast. What I would like is a way to do copies of the rsnapshot archive to a secondary disk drive. I could probably rsnapshot the rsnapshot but I wish I could make it all work with one solution on one box. That leads me to…

rdiff-backup – a different model and not rsync based but it borrows a lot I think from the approach. You want a way to install minimal software that will run against local and remove systems. You may want to write your own shell script. It does a great job of creating the deltas of backups too.

Of course, you have to accept a learning curve with either or both. On ubuntu or debian its easy to test them though and I have this setup which allows me to painlessly backup mp3s, data, web, Maildir files. I built my own little NAS super-server with a Shuttle PC, a nice AMD64 CPU, and memory. All real cheap at Newegg. So I backup from a eSATA external enclosure with two 500g drives in it configured as a RAID1 array to a 1tb Fantom USB Drive. Both are formatted XFS.

Just a plug for the Fantom drives folks. They work very well on Linux if you are needing something. I combined all the things into a little server. Now I run rsnapshot against the files and I get really fast backups. Ubuntu supports all the extremities.

Backup does not have to be hard. But you do have to invest time in deciding what you need. I don’t need full system backups. Linux is just flat files and the diffs are important so I save a number of the important files in /etc for example. I can recreate the whole install, rsync the diffs, and be back before the ole tape drive would have been done.

Weblog Realities

So I went to Drupal and I’m back. Back to Wordpress. Because its what I like.