Date: Sun, 18 Jun 2000 09:39:45 -0500 (CDT) From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Backup tools/strategy Message-ID: <14668.57137.258494.970491@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <bulk.10707.20000618055548@hub.freebsd.org> References: <bulk.10707.20000618055548@hub.freebsd.org>
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On Sat, 17 Jun 2000, Artem Koutchine wrote: > I am trying to select the right backup tool for backin up > my filesystem. As I understand i have a choice of > dump, tar, cpio. TAR and CPIO also need some sort > of external logic, wich will determine what file to > backup. > Dump is good (accroding to what man says), but has > a very bad feature - i cannot browse the archive > visually (say, wich midnight commander) and i coould > not find a way to make it compress the files it backups. Dump is the only one you can trust to get all the things that *aren't* normal files dumped and restored properly. However, those things are also rare off the root file system. If you really, really can't stand dump, you might consider using dump on the root, and "something else" elsewhere. > What i need is: > 1) A smart backupper which can do incremental backup > since given date and have a flexibale setup on what to > backup. I backup to another HDD and it is mounted > as a filesystem. at least the backupper need to skip the > backup filesystem itself Dump does this, no problem. Just set the last column of /etc/fstab to 0 for any file systems you don't want dump. > 2) A way to visually browse the backup archive and > restore seelcted files/directories As was pointed out, this is a problem with restor, not dump. If you really need this, you could write a wrapper that runs "gzcat <dumpfile> | restore tvf -" to get the data, and then runs the proper restore command for the selected files. > 3) The backupper MUST compress the backups (better > with gzip) As someone pointed out, you can just use gzip in a pipe. > My stategy is: 1 full backup every sunday morning, incremental > each day since the last incremental. I have 4GB system disk with > a lot of very important data and hosting clients and 17GB backup > disk. Backup drive is unmounted after the backup. > I also do media tests on the backup drive, industrial UPS installed > (invertor), so i am pretty sure that everything should be fine From the sounds of things, you're disaster recovery backups, not archival backups. In that case, about the only thing you might want to do is buy a second drive and the hardware so yo can hot swap it, and then once a week (between the last incremental and the full) swap drives, and take the one you just pulled offsite. Personally, I do fulls (roughly) quarterly, incrementals to the last full weekly, and daily incrementals to the last weekly. The fulls go to disk and thence CD-ROM, and the weeklys go to CDROM when they get get large enough to warrant it. The CD-ROMs get stored offsite. > Any suggestions on the software or should i write it myself? For a single system, I'd suggest writing some wrappers for dump/restore that do what you want. That seems to be SOP, as there's no freeware product flexible enough to make everyone happy, and the commercial ones have never been up to snuff. If you want, you can have my backup scripts (one run from cron for all incrementals; one to burn and verify CDs) to start from. <mike To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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