backup tools

[Roland Smith]

On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 06:37:17PM -0600, Chad Perrin wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 08:47:40PM +0200, Roland Smith wrote:
> > On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 10:09:03AM -0600, Chad Perrin wrote:
> > > I'm setting up a "new" backup server using FreeBSD.  It will be used for
> > > backing up laptops, which will not be connected to the network by any
> > > kind of schedule, so backups will be initiated manually rather than by
> > > cron or other scheduled procedures.
> > 
> > What are the laptops running?
> 
> FreeBSD, Debian, and/or Ubuntu.  There's at least one of each.  I
> apologize for not mentioning that sooner.  I had a feeling I'd overlook
> something.

Hmm, I'm not sure that there is _anything_ that meets _all_ your criteria!

For backing up complete systems (including boot blocks) I've used Clonezilla
Live to good effect. On the several standalone systems I tried it on, it
managed around 1 GiB/minute, backing up to a USB HDD. It can also back-up to a
ssh, samba or nfs server. Of course this doesn't do incremental backups, and
it is GPL.

If you don't care about the OS, and just want to back up the user's data, I
guess rsync would be the way to go. This in turn will not save the boot block,
although you could use dd for that I guess.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://rsmith.home.xs4all.nl/
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