On Thu, 2004-02-19 at 16:20, Guy Zelck wrote:
Tom Nielsen wrote:
I was just about to setup a raid 1 when I realized I didn't want to really accomplish that. What I want is something to backup my system incase I fubar something. So, rather than dd my drive every night, I'm wondering how I can backup my system where only the changed files get backed up rather than the whole drive. I looked at rsync but I'm not sure if that's what I want.
Any advice?
Tom
find / -mtime -1 -print | cpio -ovcB >/dev/rmt0
Guy.
That works, but if you have the extra disk space, I like rdiff-backup. It uses an rsync like algorithm to find changes inside a file, but it keeps old revisions around so you can get back to were a file was a few days ago. The only problem with is if something goes wrong in the code. It is written in python on I think, and if something breaks it outputs a whole stack dump. Sort of hard for a casual user to undrstand. Now for an exotic proposal that was inspired by your dd comment: (ie. Don't do this unless you want to experiment. It will take you a while to setup and get working right and you have to recreate your filesystems.) You could use LVM snapshots. With those you could initiate a snapshot at midnight, then all day long any low level disk blocks get saved before the new data is written to disk. If you decide you need a file the way it is on the snapshot, you simply mount the snapshot read-only and copy it back off. If you want any sort of performance, you will want to put your snapshot volume on another physical disk than the main volume, but in the same server. I don't know if you can setup 2 snapshots or not. ie. alternating snapshots for last night and the night before. Using alternating snapshots is not unusual with high-end storage systems, but I don't know if LVM supports it or not. Greg