Continuous backup of critical system files

[chris scott]

2009/8/24 Maxim Khitrov <mkhitrov at gmail.com>

> Hello all,
>
> I'm setting up a firewall using FreeBSD 7.2 and thought that it may
> not be a bad idea to have a continuous backup for important files like
> pf and dnsmasq configurations. By continuous I mean some script that
> would be triggered every few minutes from cron to automatically create
> a backup of any monitored file if it was modified. I also have a full
> system backup in place that is executed daily (dump/restore to a
> compact flash card), so the continuous backup would really be for
> times when someone makes a mistake editing one of the config files and
> needs to revert it to a previous state.
>
> My initial thought was to create a mercurial repository at the file
> system root and exclude everything except for explicitly added files.
> I'd then run something like "hg commit -m `date`" from cron every 10
> minutes to record the changes automatically. Can anyone think of a
> better way to do this (existing port specifically for this purpose)?
> Obviously, I need a way to track the history of a file and revert to a
> previous state quickly. The storage of changes should be as
> size-efficient as possible.
>
> - Max
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I rsync all my system files to a filer running zfs. I have a separate zfs fs
for every host and then I snapshot the fs after the rsync. We then keep 35
snapshots for retention as we do daily rsyncs.


You might want more of a rolling snapshot policy. Keep on for every 10 mins
of the last hour, then drop it to hourly for the next 6 hours, then daily,
then weekly etc

Works quite well. We have also found it  handy for forensics as well, when
we have had a fault