Am Samstag, 12. Dezember 2015, 09:49:15 schrieb Lew Wolfgang:

Hi Jan,

storeBackup sounds really interesting! Do you know how well it works when backing up to a remote machine?

I use a luks encrypted iSCSI volume on my NAS as the target. :)

NFS? sshfs? Rdiff-backup uses a ssh tunnel for remote backups.

NFS works and sshfs should work. In case of sshfs the FAQ says that you should perform the deduplication (by creating hardlinks) directly on the target server because of performance: http://www.nongnu.org/storebackup/en/node85.html#myfaqSSH I am not quite sure whether sshfs supports special files like sockets, pipes, and so on. However, storeBackup is able to archive these types of files using cpio or tar. Furthermore, the slicing of big VM files and the deduplication directly on the target server might not be compatible. IIRC you have to pick one.

I have two use cases:

1. Backup to other disk(s) on the same machine.

The easy one... :)

2. Backup of many machines to a common backup server.

I've been using cron'ed scripts on the common server to reach out to all the remote machines (using ssh) to run the rdiff-backup incremental dumps. Root access to the remote machines is granted via public pki keys and so is as secure as the common dump server. Having the dumps coordinated from the main backup server is nice in that the whole process is controlled from one spot and you don't have 20 machines all trying to dump at once, clogging everything up.

Cool! If the clients should mount the target server only on demand, there is the script storeBackupMount that mounts, starts the backup and unmounts. Besides, this scenario might be better handled by a Bacula, Amanda, or another "enterprise level" backup system specially designed for backing up many machines over the network. Gruß Jan -- If you knew what you were doing you'd probably be bored. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 12/12/2015 02:04 AM, Greg Freemyer wrote:

On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 6:40 PM, Lew Wolfgang wrote:

...

Hi Folks,

I've been using rdiff-backup for many years, both at home and in a client/server setup at work. But it's getting a bit long in the tooth and I get occasional crashes seeming caused by a problem with gzip.py. (IOError: Negative seek in write mode) It seems that rdiff-backup hasn't been updated since 2009, maybe it's time for me to switch? But to what?

I'm dong backups to disk, rather than to tape, and the disks are either local or remote. The candidate system should back up to a regular filesystem, and be accessible just like the source. The backup should be an up-to-date copy of the source at the time the backup was run. It should do incremental backups, and be able to restore to any given time the backup was run. For instance, if the process is run on a daily basis, you should be able to recover a file/directory that was removed 30 or more days ago. I've recovered files that had been removed two years ago with rdiff-backup. It's not necessary for individual users to recover their own stuff, it's enough for root to do it for them. I know about rsync, but it doesn't do the history thing, as far as I know.

Can anyone offer any suggestions?

Thanks, Lew I too was a big fan of rdiff-backup. I don't know of an equivalent.

I am now using a cloud service: spideroak

Spideroak sounds interesting, but I've got more than 3-TB of stuff on my home system and hundreds of TB at my customer's site. Further, my customer won't allow cloud storage. That being said, I'm going to check out spideroak for a subset of the really important stuff, like those old photos of the Fetching Mrs Wolfgang. Also, after a short exchange on the rdiff-backup mailing list, Joe Steele and Andrea Cozzolino figured out that the main openSUSE repositories don't have the most up-to-date version of rdiff-backup. Two patches have been applied to the version in the "Archiving" repository. The patch: https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/259636 The repo: http://software.opensuse.org/download.html?project=Archiving&package=rdiff-backup It seems to have fixed my problem, which was something about negative seeks in sparse files. Regards, Lew -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

I use rsnapshot here too, both hourly (6x a day) and daily, with a 4-week retention. My rsnapshot.conf: config_version 1.2 snapshot_root /backup/ no_create_root 1 cmd_cp /bin/cp cmd_rm /bin/rm cmd_rsync /usr/bin/rsync cmd_ssh /usr/bin/ssh cmd_logger /usr/bin/logger cmd_du /usr/bin/du cmd_rsnapshot_diff /usr/bin/rsnapshot-diff interval hourly 6 interval daily 7 interval weekly 4 verbose 2 loglevel 3 logfile /var/log/rsnapshot lockfile /var/run/rsnapshot.pid rsync_short_args -rlptgDEvHhXAo rsync_long_args --delete --numeric-ids --relative --delete-excluded include_file /usr/scripts/backup/backup.include exclude_file /usr/scripts/backup/backup.exclude link_dest 1 use_lazy_deletes 1 backup / countryside/ backup.exclude: #exclude - /proc/* - /tmp/* - /backup/* - /dev/* - /sys/* - /mnt/* - lost+found/ - /.journal - /.fsck - /var/lib/named/proc/* - /var/lib/ntp/proc/* - /var/lib/php5/sessions/* - /var/run/* - /var/tmp/* - /var/spool/* - /var/cache/* - /var/lock/* - /run/* - /opt/minecraft/* - ibdata* - ib_logfile* - /data/exclude/* backup.include: #include + /dev/console + /dev/initctl + /dev/null + /dev/zero + / cron entries: #server hard drive 0 */4 * * * /usr/scripts/backup/rsnapshot_hourly.sh | mail -s 'Hourly backup log' myemail@domain.com 30 3 * * * /usr/scripts/backup/rsnapshot_daily.sh | mail -s 'Daily backup log' myemail@domain.com rsnapshot_hourly.sh: #!/bin/bash #Make sure that script isn't already running; die if it is. SCRIPTNAME=`basename $0` PIDFILE=/var/run/${SCRIPTNAME}.pid if [ -f ${PIDFILE} ]; then #verify if the process is actually still running under this pid OLDPID=`cat ${PIDFILE}` RESULT=`ps -ef | grep ${OLDPID} | grep ${SCRIPTNAME}` if [ -n "${RESULT}" ]; then echo "Backup already running! Exiting." exit 255 fi fi #grab pid of this process and update the pid file with it PID=`ps -ef | grep ${SCRIPTNAME} | head -n1 | awk ' {print $2;} '` echo ${PID} > ${PIDFILE} mount | grep backup > /dev/null if [ ! "$?" -eq "0" ]; then echo Mounting Backup volume mount /backup fi mount | grep backup > /dev/null if [ ! "$?" -eq "0" ]; then echo Backup volume not mounted, fail. exit 2 fi echo Starting backup... /usr/bin/rsnapshot hourly echo Backup finished. echo echo df -hx tmpfs echo Unmounting backup volume. umount /backup mount | grep backup > /dev/null if [ ! "$?" -eq "0" ]; then echo Backup volume unmounted. fi if [ -f ${PIDFILE} ]; then rm ${PIDFILE} fi rsnapshot_daily.sh: #!/bin/bash #Make sure that script isn't already running; die if it is. SCRIPTNAME=`basename $0` PIDFILE=/var/run/${SCRIPTNAME}.pid if [ -f ${PIDFILE} ]; then #verify if the process is actually still running under this pid OLDPID=`cat ${PIDFILE}` RESULT=`ps -ef | grep ${OLDPID} | grep ${SCRIPTNAME}` if [ -n "${RESULT}" ]; then echo "Backup already running! Exiting." exit 255 fi fi #grab pid of this process and update the pid file with it PID=`ps -ef | grep ${SCRIPTNAME} | head -n1 | awk ' {print $2;} '` echo ${PID} > ${PIDFILE} mount | grep backup > /dev/null if [ ! "$?" -eq "0" ]; then echo Mounting Backup volume mount /backup/ fi mount | grep backup > /dev/null if [ ! "$?" -eq "0" ]; then echo Backup volume not mounted, fail. exit 2 fi echo Starting backup... /usr/bin/rsnapshot daily echo Backup finished. echo echo df -hx tmpfs echo Unmounting backup volume. umount /backup mount | grep backup > /dev/null if [ ! "$?" -eq "0" ]; then echo Backup volume unmounted. fi if [ -f ${PIDFILE} ]; then rm ${PIDFILE} fi -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org