[opensuse] Backup solutions

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Philippe Landau

18 Nov 2007 18 Nov '07

13:37

What can a simple user use to backup his installation ? Also what simple backup solution do you recommend for your personal data ? I hope this is not too repetitive. http://opensuse-community.org/ does not discuss it and apparently the OpenSuse Wiki only points to opensuse.org. Kind regards Philippe -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

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Bryen

18 Nov 18 Nov

13:45

On Sun, 2007-11-18 at 14:37 +0100, Philippe Landau wrote:

...

What can a simple user use to backup his installation ?

Also what simple backup solution do you recommend for your personal data ?

I hope this is not too repetitive. http://opensuse-community.org/ does not discuss it and apparently the OpenSuse Wiki only points to opensuse.org.

Kind regards Philippe

I think "simplest" is subjective to individual preferences. But for me, I think the simplest method of backups is by using rsync. If you have the space for it, rsync will mirror entire directories from one dir on your local computer to another dir either on your local computer or a remote computer. There is also tar. With tar, you can use a snapshot file to backup only newer files in an incremental fashion. Really, backups strategy is going to be dependent on what methods you find fits bets with what you have available in terms of disk space and such. -- ---Bryen--- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Carlos E. R.

14:04

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Sunday 2007-11-18 at 14:37 +0100, Philippe Landau wrote:

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What can a simple user use to backup his installation ?

Also what simple backup solution do you recommend for your personal data ?

The simpler method for frequent use it to rsync to an external HD, on usb, for instance (which I power off after doing the backup). For long term I save my work files to DVD in duplicate (perhaps using zisofs compressed format). There are improved rsync style solutions that keep older versions, an history of changes, like rdiff-backup or dirvish. - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.4-svn0 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFHQEZntTMYHG2NR9URAm/LAKCDzuureZYBllALNVMW656bkJNjSACcChag W7nph+qx9btxbetqMb2LX48= =yCZK -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Basil Chupin

19 Nov 19 Nov

03:29

Carlos E. R. wrote:

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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1

The Sunday 2007-11-18 at 14:37 +0100, Philippe Landau wrote:

...
What can a simple user use to backup his installation ?

Also what simple backup solution do you recommend for your personal data ?

The simpler method for frequent use it to rsync to an external HD, on usb, for instance (which I power off after doing the backup). For long term I save my work files to DVD in duplicate (perhaps using zisofs compressed format).

There are improved rsync style solutions that keep older versions, an history of changes, like rdiff-backup or dirvish. There is a Backup facility in Yast2.

Does anyone have experience using it and/or any comments about it? Ciao. -- Past experience, if not forgotten, is a guide for the future. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Carlos E. R.

13:38

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Monday 2007-11-19 at 14:29 +1100, Basil Chupin wrote:

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There is a Backup facility in Yast2.

Does anyone have experience using it and/or any comments about it?

I used it about two years ago, not recently. What it did was a rpm check to see what files in the rpm database had changed, and made a backup of them, in tar.gz form (a variant). It did not include, for instance, new configuration files. It was thus a diferential system backup (a nice idea), but incomplete, and thus, dangerous in the false feeling of security it gave. It was also slow. It had a tick box to backup also everything, and you could list directories to include, and perhaps to exclude (no nice gui browser at all, you had to hand type the paths). The problem is that first it copied the entire tree somewhere under /tmp, meaning you needed as much free space there as the raw uncompressed backup would use - and it crashed otherwise, after hours of work. I don't know how things may have improved: I hope they did. I should try it one day, I think... - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.4-svn0 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFHQZHQtTMYHG2NR9URAqlcAJ9JK0zKFfMjXwOKqv9LfQNtbJNWEQCfWF9J LgY6tIUC7rqbQHs0Kj+/LeQ= =hiuw -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Jeffrey L. Taylor

18 Nov 18 Nov

15:10

Quoting Philippe Landau :

...

What can a simple user use to backup his installation ?

External USB,eSATA,Firewire hard disk. Use System Rescue CD and dd to copy entire partitions to hard disk. This is for bare metal restore. Use rsnapshot (which uses rsync) for daily/weekly/monthly/etc. backups. Before you do a clean install or maybe even an update, be sure to do another copy with dd of the overwritten partitions to the external hard drive. Note: partition copies can be mounted with the loop devices so you can get at the files on them. Unless you are backing up everything with the daily backups, you will find that something needed is not backed up. Oh, and check those partition backups with md5sum or by mounting them on a loop device and running the file system check on them, e.g. e2fschk. HTH, Jeffrey -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Aaron Kulkis

19 Nov 19 Nov

03:12

Jeffrey L. Taylor wrote:

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Quoting Philippe Landau :

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What can a simple user use to backup his installation ?

External USB,eSATA,Firewire hard disk. Use System Rescue CD and dd to copy entire partitions to hard disk. This is for bare metal restore. Use

Why would you want a byte-by-byte copy of the raw disk or any of it's partitions? That ends up including unused/deallocated blocks. Any rational backup system requires is only that which resides in files, and the overall directory structure, not blocks which are currently NOT allocated to any file or directory. For this purpose, dump, which writes to a raw device, is FAR better than dd. For one thing, you can restore individual files, and if you do a complete restore, you can just mkfs the filesystem, and when you restore, you have a nice, tight and totally unfragmented filesystem. dd allows none of this. dump is made for backups -- doing what a backup needs to do, which is to make LOGICAL images of the data. dd is made for making exact (not logical) images, which is really NOT desirable for most system restores.

...

rsnapshot (which uses rsync) for daily/weekly/monthly/etc. backups. Before you do a clean install or maybe even an update, be sure to do another copy with dd of the overwritten partitions to the external hard drive.

Note: partition copies can be mounted with the loop devices so you can get at the files on them. Unless you are backing up everything with the daily backups, you will find that something needed is not backed up.

Of course, if the filesystem gets hosed, then you might not be able to read the file with the loopback filesystem in it....

...

Oh, and check those partition backups with md5sum or by mounting them on a loop device and running the file system check on them, e.g. e2fschk.

HTH, Jeffrey

-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Jeffrey L. Taylor

20 Nov 20 Nov

20:05

Quoting Aaron Kulkis :

...

Jeffrey L. Taylor wrote:

...
Quoting Philippe Landau :

...
What can a simple user use to backup his installation ?

External USB,eSATA,Firewire hard disk. Use System Rescue CD and dd to copy entire partitions to hard disk. This is for bare metal restore. Use

Why would you want a byte-by-byte copy of the raw disk or any of it's partitions? That ends up including unused/deallocated blocks. Any rational backup system requires is only that which resides in files, and the overall directory structure, not blocks which are currently NOT allocated to any file or directory.

Because dd is file-system independent. You don't yet trust the NTFS support in Linux, no problem. Your bare metal restore boot CD doesn't support the exotic file system you use for your database partition. Not a problem. Weird undocumented partition/filesystem used by the OEM (e.g. recovery partition on IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads or some Compacs). Same thing. Looking at the dump Web site, it appears that dump is still for extfs2 only. That was the reason why I stopped using it years ago. Though it was nice until I switched file systems. Note: the raw partition copies are for bare metal restores (i.e., the whole disk went up is smoke and you are replacing it with a blank hard drive). There are better programs for daily backup and restore. Because dump bypasses the OS file system code, it MUST support the filesystem you use. Most other utilities go thru the OS and will support most file systems the OS does. However, Access Control Lists (ACLs) and other high security file system features are another matter. Jeffrey -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Filip Brcic

18 Nov 18 Nov

15:38

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Дана недеља 18 новембар 2007, Philippe Landau је написао(ла):

...

What can a simple user use to backup his installation ?

Also what simple backup solution do you recommend for your personal data ?

I hope this is not too repetitive. http://opensuse-community.org/ does not discuss it and apparently the OpenSuse Wiki only points to opensuse.org.

I would recomend using dar (possibly with kdar frontend) for backups. It supports incremental backups, but backups are kept in some kind of archives (multi-volume ones) that can be put to CDs, DVDs, ... That approach brings good sides of both rsync-based backup and tar-based backup. I really don't have enough space to do rsync of my home directory, but I can spare a few CDs or DVDs per month to store another increment of the backup. Maybe it is not unwise to do a full backup once or twice a year and incremental backup once a week or once a month. If you include dvdisaster error correction codes with the backups, the solutions sounds quite safe to me. - -- Filip Brcic WWWeb: http://purl.org/NET/brcha/home/ Jabber: brcha@kdetalk.net -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.4-svn0 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFHQFxjeugpoxYs6H8RAmIhAKCuj3fHYd+Bu3Y0vUG1kVI1O7dMwACgsKXJ Tv2NKcwNvdih9cgg7HGmXHk= =3FoV -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

John Meyer

19 Nov 19 Nov

02:57

Philippe Landau wrote:

...

What can a simple user use to backup his installation ?

Also what simple backup solution do you recommend for your personal data ?

I'd check out one of the many free file storage sites around. Going on the presumption that you don't need that much for your _personal_ data, and really who does, you can find a GB is more than sufficient. Some use their e-mail site for this (gmail, for instnace), but I would prefer a site designed for file storage. I use http://www.4shared.com and http://www.xdrive.com, both free with more than plenty of storage. Using localized physical data, I'd go with a jump drive or an external hard drive. I have both (a 220 GB personal hard drive and a couple of jumps) and they suit me just as well. Other people go with DVDRWs or CDRWs, but both seem a little too prone to scratching unless you encase them. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

G T Smith

10:28

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Philippe Landau wrote:

...

What can a simple user use to backup his installation ?

Also what simple backup solution do you recommend for your personal data ?

I hope this is not too repetitive. http://opensuse-community.org/ does not discuss it and apparently the OpenSuse Wiki only points to opensuse.org.

Kind regards Philippe

This is an old topic, but well worth reviewing. People have mentioned various solutions, and a little while back I had a look at most of these options.... The thing to note with a backup is that is nearly useless unless you are able to get back what you have backed up. Whatever solution you choose, verify you can recover data with it in the way that you want it. 1) Dar in some ways the most limited of the options, to effectively be used with removable media some scripting is required. It can be considered as basically Tar with most of the more sophisticated options removed. It is not particularly fast in operation. KDar the gui frontend when I last looked at it made only limited use of the limited number of Dar options available. This is the simplest option. It also has some minor limitations on what it will store. It is designed to be used with removable and fixed media (but not really tapes), and I am not entirely convinced about how usable it would be if one only wanted to recover a single file. 2) Tar is the old staple (with star as its posix compliant cousin). It has an intimidating number of options, but it is reliable and very powerful. It is worth reading the info documentation (the man page is more likely to confuse someone who has not dealt with tar before). While originally designed for tape backups it is much more than that now. 3) Rsync is the most powerful option, however I not completely convinced that it is really suited to the home user for personal data backup. It is not suited for use with removable media and you will need a dedicated external storage either on a usb drive or on a server. 4) Bacula is a tape orientated backup solution, as is Taper ( http://taper.sourceforge.net/). Bacula is not exactly easy to setup, and Taper has some serious limitations on how much it will backup and what it will backup to (and it is five years since the last update). I have noticed a test version of something called gadminburn, but this requires cdrecord (does not seem to like wodim) and runs only in root. As data backup and archive solutions 1) and 2) do have a major limitation in that information on the backup is limited to each backup. Tracking of different versions of file over time has to be done independently of the backup application. Rsync can be configured to do this but unless you have a large amount of of constantly changing personal data is probably a bit of overkill. Option 2) and 3) are best used as part of overnight jobs, but 1) could be workable as a manual operation. The days when someone slammed a floppy in the drive and copied the days work then turned the machine are long gone... But for most home users something that does something similar is really all that they require, Personally I have a daily cron scripts that does backups up to DVD with tar. (Hopefully, soon to be replaced with a archive script that is a work in progress). - -- ============================================================================== I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone. Bjarne Stroustrup ============================================================================== -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with SUSE - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHQWViasN0sSnLmgIRAnOUAKCtlp/XPdBFAKkGqVbNoU6A+DkmWACgsO2l gOlIKvlzuZYyP8Usz2D35ak= =ET9s -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Filip Brcic

15:44

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Дана понедељак 19 новембар 2007, G T Smith је написао(ла):

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Philippe Landau wrote:

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What can a simple user use to backup his installation ?

This is an old topic, but well worth reviewing.

This topic is not so old, IMHO :)

...

1) Dar in some ways the most limited of the options, to effectively be used with removable media some scripting is required. It can be considered as basically Tar with most of the more sophisticated options removed. It is not particularly fast in operation. KDar the gui frontend when I last looked at it made only limited use of the limited number of Dar options available. This is the simplest option. It also has some minor limitations on what it will store.

It is designed to be used with removable and fixed media (but not really tapes), and I am not entirely convinced about how usable it would be if one only wanted to recover a single file.

It works quite well if you want to recover only one (or several) files. Although I don't really know if doing that would be too easy using CLI, but KDar GUI can browse through dar archives and you can recover any file you want. Good thing is that you can also make so called isolations which are small and can be kept on the disk. You can think of the isolation as the table of contents for the archive. You just open the most recent isolation, find your file and drag it to the place you want to put it. Afterwards KDar will tell you to put the right CD/DVD into the drive and copy the file. Quite usable.

...

2) Tar is the old staple (with star as its posix compliant cousin). It has an intimidating number of options, but it is reliable and very powerful. It is worth reading the info documentation (the man page is more likely to confuse someone who has not dealt with tar before). While originally designed for tape backups it is much more than that now.

The worst problem with tar is it not supporting incremental backups. With 500GB disks I think that incremental backup is crucial for home users (it does introduce bigger probability of loosing backup, but it also uses less DVDs which are cheap, but take a lot of space @ home and a lot of time when you have to burn them once a month or so).

...

3) Rsync is the most powerful option, however I not completely convinced 4) Bacula is a tape orientated backup solution, as is Taper (

Rsync, tapes and RAIDs are mostly for servers. If I had another drive, I would fill it with data, not with backup :) And most home users don't have tapes, as far as I know.

...

As data backup and archive solutions 1) and 2) do have a major limitation in that information on the backup is limited to each backup. Tracking of different versions of file over time has to be done independently of the backup application.

Nope, as I said dar supports incremental backups and therefore file versioning from backup to backup. Happy hacking Filip - -- Filip Brcic WWWeb: http://purl.org/NET/brcha/home/ Jabber: brcha@kdetalk.net -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.4-svn0 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFHQa9qeugpoxYs6H8RApnAAJ0a+K6wu6CD+AZBZeiCmX4ZMx86OQCeKWuv o+AgBBQ+a6taLf7WQ9bj53w= =T1Ft -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

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participants (9)

Aaron Kulkis
Basil Chupin
Bryen
Carlos E. R.
Filip Brcic
G T Smith
Jeffrey L. Taylor
John Meyer
Philippe Landau