On Monday 09 of December 2013 12:06:17 John Andersen wrote:
Rsync isn't a backup tool.
I've been using it for years as a backup tool and it serves this purpose fine.
You can delete a mountain of stuff, corrupt a zillion files, and not notice it till AFTER the next rsync run, which will dutifully clobbers your backup in the same way.
Agreed, but this does not mean it isn't a backup tool.
Having moved to Linux from a Novel Netware environment, I really missed the "Salvage" facility that Novel had. It would keep multiple copies of changed files so you could step backward through each changed version of a file till you found the last known good version.
So I wrote a little shell script to copy user+critical-data every 10 minutes to a salvage area each date-stamped. It is self maintaining in that it removes the "salvage" files after a period of time sufficient for the the BRU backup to captures them. The storage is requirement is surprisingly minimal.
rdiff-backup does something similar. It takes a full backup, then incremental with diffs against the full backup, which saves a lot of space, and you can set the number of incrementals to preserve. This way I keep several months of versions of important files. Btrfs should make this easier and more robust in the future. Be warned that the last version of rdiff-backup was released in 2009 and it appears not to be maintained any more. Regards, Peter -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org