Introduction
This page describes various backup procedures which have been used by AlexisHuxley on his home network.
I have three use cases:
case |
description |
snapshot |
home and mail automatically backed up hourly during waking hours to another volume on the same storage server and retained for 2 months |
OS |
all systems' OSs automatically backed up once per week to another volume on the same storage server and retained for 2 months |
offsite |
everything manually backed up roughly once per month to USB disk and retained offsite until media rotation necessitates reuse |
Until summer 2011, I used cron+rdiff-backup for snapshotting and ConfiguringUsbbu2BackupServices for offsite backups. But I wanted a single and community supported solution.
From summer 2011 to winter 2011 I used ConfiguringAmandaBackupServices for all use cases. But insufficiently responsive automatic bumping meant that I was frequently running out of space on the VTL storage volume and, despite much use, I felt my knowledge of its configuration remained insufficient.
From winter 2011 I used ConfiguringRdiffBackupServices. Although the wrapper scripts that call rdiff-backup (which amount to cron entries) remain in active development, the underlying backup is rdiff-backup, with which my experience in the past has been very good.
Procedures
ConfiguringAmandaBackupServices (advantages: industry standard product; disadvantages: uninituitive/non-standard approach to specification of backup levels, not suitable for snapshotting, complicated configuration, nigh on impossible to recover from full VTL without discarding backups, inadequate protection of last full backup on tape)
ConfiguringRdiffBackupServices (advantages: suitable for snapshotting, no configuration except cronjobs, very fast full backups; disadvantages: not very widely used)
ConfiguringUsbbu2BackupServices (advantages: checks all filesystems are backed up or explicitly excluded from backup; disadvantages: only does full backup, only used by AlexisHuxley, no community support)
See also
- Computing