backup-manager
Today it was time to implement an automatic backup solution at work. I was searching for the right tool quite long but there were several problems. First of all I don’t like commercial software on my systems. I also don’t like bloat software which requires as much or even more harddisc space than my whole woody-system. Finally I like solutions which are extensible without having to learn another programing language. ;-)
grml provides the tool backup-manager by Alexis Sukrieh. It’s small and fits my needs perfectly. I added some stuff to backup-manager which I do need for the backup system at work and send a patch to Alexis. Alexis already applied my patch, he just released version 0.4.0 and set up a website for backup-manager. If you are a Debian developer and are interested in sponsoring Alexis and backup-manager please contact me or Alexis. Till now Alexis hasn’t had that much luck but I’d really like to see backup-manager as part of main debian pool because it’s easy to set up and works like a charme.
Together with samba and rsync/ssh backup-manager will do the job.[tm]
October 27th, 2004 at 19:04
I like backup2l very much. I did not try the backup-manager described above but backup2l works perfectly (too).
There is also a Debian package avaliable and backup2l also stores the current dpkg-package selection as you might want to be done.
It is very customizable (though the default-configuration is quite nice for an average configuration): select your own compression tool, select the number of differential backups between the full backups, …
It’s awful fast as I recognised: 2.2GB full-backup on a slow harddrive (approx. 4-5 MB/s) lasts 41 minutes; 7MB differential backup on the very same day (backupl had to check 3.6GB of data) in 49 seconds!
Give it also a try.
October 27th, 2004 at 20:55
Mika :
Thanks for this blog entry :)
Karl :
I’m not sure if backup2l is 100% manageable through debconf. Also does it allow you to use existing ftp or ssh accounts for file tranferts ?
Those are the main purpose of backup-manager :
– being really easy to setup and to use.
– using existing well known structure for transfert.
November 4th, 2004 at 12:13
Mika:
Right now, backup2l is not quite configurable through debconf. But you only have to set up one file: /etc/backup2l
You can add an entry as a post-backup-command but it’d be of no use for transferring the backup to a server because backup2l needs the old files for comparison (differential backup). But you might mount another file-system through various kind of methods. And this is independent from the backup-system as it should be (IMHO). E.g. you can add this mount-command as a pre-backup-command and the umount-command as a post-backup-command. With this method you get the unattended backup too.
But if you want a backup-script that transfers the files all within the script, backup2l is not suitable.