Backup advice

[David N]

On 24/05/07, Howard Goldstein <hg at queue.to> wrote:
> Jason Lixfeld wrote:
> > - Other folks dumping to a hard drive at night?  Care to share any of
> > your experiences/rationale?
>
> Not with dump/restore.  After using amanda and a tape drive for eons I'm
> now happy with a bacula solution to backup 2 freebsds and a windows
> machine.  It does incrementals except on Saturday night when it
> alternates between a differential (sort of a mass incremental from the
> last full) and a full backup to a cheap IDE drive.  Every Sunday I copy
> the IDE drive to a USB drive and take it offsite and bring back another
> one.
>
> After restoring from scratch - power supply frying the entire RAID array
>   on my desktop -STABLE machine - I think the advantages of dump are
> certainly there but for my apps, where I don't have any huge sparse
> files or a lot of hard links other than whatever gets installed with a
> fresh install (if anything) to worry about - they're outweighed by the
> convenience of bacula where I can go back to a point in time.  YMMV...
>
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We have something similar, we use rsnapshot (/usr/ports/sysutils/rsnapshot/)
http://www.rsnapshot.org/

The first rsnapshot takes up the full amount of space and rsnapshot
there after only takes up the space of those files that have changed.