incremental FTP backup program

[Brandon Low]

I have a backup system that I created for rougly that scenario.  It's
not bullet proof, not well tested in the community, etc.  I haven't even
tried the FTP Transport on FreeBSD yet.

http://lostlogicx.com/backupsblow/

I use it over S3 to backup my server personally.

--Brandon

On 2009-12-17 (Thu) at 23:39:40 +0100, Roland Smith wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 10:55:54PM +0100, bsd wrote:
> 
> > Are there any specific scripting tools that I could use in order to achieve
> > that ?
> 
> Well, /bin/sh and 'man sh' spring to mind. :-) Or use another scripting
> language if you are more familiar with that, e.g. perl or python. But since
> you are mainly invoking programs, a plain shell-script would be my first choice.
> 
> > From what you are describing a tool that would automate the dump process and
> > take care of snapshots versions would be a must??? ??
> 
> See e.g. the dodumps script on my scripts page; http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/software/scripts.html
> 
> It just names the dumps 'filesystem-dumplevel-date.dump',
> e.g. root-0-20091217.dump. You could extend this script to transfer the dumps
> via ftp, and remove old dumps from the FTP site. After testing, you could even
> run it from cron.
> 
> Start off with a level 0 dump, and then perform higher level dumps as often as
> you need. Google for 'dump levels', and you'll find lots of different schemes,
> e.g. http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-5093/bkupconcepts-21?a=view
> 
> I would urge you to keep things simple. The more complicated the your
> solution, the easier things can go wrong.
> 
> One caveat about dump though. If one of your filesystems contains just one big
> database in a huge file, dump will copy the whole file even if just one byte
> has changed. In such a case you should see if the database has tools to just
> copy the records changed since the last backup and use that instead.
> 
> 
> Roland
> -- 
> R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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