Looking for a Good FreeBSD and General Unix Backup System

[Greg Larkin]

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Martin McCormick wrote:
> 	Several months ago, I started using dar to backup a
> number of FreeBSD and Linux systems to one FreeBSD box. It
> worked fine once one got the syntax of the remote commands
> working, but then it all died when I moved it to a new
> FreeBSD6.3 system. 
> 
> 	If I can't figure out what is wrong or whether it is
> worth fixing, I am going to have to find some other archiver so
> we can get good backups and trust them to be easily restored.
> 
> 	What we plan to do is backup a bunch of Unix systems to
> one FreeBSD box and then use a commercial package to back that
> box up to an enterprise-wide system we use. The archiver we need
> must be able to make 1 full backup of each system like tar and
> then incrementals until we are ready for another full backup.
> 
> 	Any suggestions as to what is best? Dar seemed to be
> okay until the incrementals would hang each time with some error
> messages about the format version being too high which is bogus
> because we are using the same version for all the effected
> systems.
> 
> 	The archive files should use tar or some other common
> storage method so we could unpack an archive from a Linux system
> in to a FreeBSD directory or vice versa.
> 
> 	Any backup packages using tar would be fine as long as
> they can do incremental backups and use ssh as the transport.
> 
> 	Any ideas are appreciated.
> 
> 	Thank you.
> 
> Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
> Systems Engineer
> OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group

Hi Martin,

It doesn't use tar, but I've had great luck with rsnapshot
(http://www.freshports.org/sysutils/rsnapshot/ -
http://www.rsnapshot.org/) for backing up multiple RedHat Linux and
FreeBSD servers to a central server over SSH.

rsnapshot is very flexible and you can set up your desired retention
policies - hourly, daily, weekly and monthly.  The destination backup
tree is kept as small as possible with the use of hard links.

Best of luck,
Greg Larkin
- --
Greg Larkin

http://www.FreeBSD.org/       - The Power To Serve
http://www.sourcehosting.net/ - Ready. Set. Code.
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