[KLUG Members] LAN backup solutions, anyone?

[Robert V. Kanaley]

>If you are doing backups on a regular basis on a mixed
>Linux/Unix/Windows
>LAN, I'd like to see something about your experience and
>favorites tools,
>techniques, etc. What works best for you? Have any expensive and time-
>consuming failures? What do we get? What do we avoid?

For data backups I prefer disk to disk. This allows quick and easy data
recovery. Hard drives are cheap and rsync is easy on network bandwidth. I
use rsync or unison (unison is cross platform) so I am not moving any more
data across the network than I have to.

To backup data on Windbloz client machines, I map a drive to a home
directory on a NAS or on a samba file server. Then I have task scheduler run
a nightly unison job to rsync the changed files.

To do server to server backups, I use a modification of Mike Rubel's Easy
Automated Snapshot-Style Backups with Linux and Rsync
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/. I have cron run a
grandfather-father-son, tape like, rsync backup scheme between a Red Hat box
and a SuSE 9 box. By using the GNU cp -al capability on the backup box I can
have a multi-backup structure of ./mon ./tues ./wed ... ./fri4 ./fri5  ...
./Q3 ./Q4, but only use the amount of disk space equal to the size of the
first backup plus the size of the changed files. I'm not doing it, but for
added redundancy you can rotate the backup location between multiple
servers.

I haven't put the last part in place yet, but I will use samba on the backup
server to make the READ ONLY backups available so that people can do
unattended restores by doing a simple copy.

Regards,

Bob

Robert V. Kanaley
Manager Information Systems
Agdia, Inc.
rvk at agdia.com
http://www.agdia.com