factorQ.net

Backups can be very important, no one wants to lose any of their data–especially if it has happened to you before.

I have previously setup my x64 desktop PC with softRAID, so everything I have in my /home folder is mirrored across 2 drives.  However, I am not sure if I am overly paranoid, or maybe I just like to be extra secure because now I have implemented an additional backup measure.

It started when I read some of this stuff about backups and solutions, so I decided I should probably do something similar.  The one from distrowatch really pushed me a long though, as the Q&A thing really made sense.

To start off, I began by reading the ArchWiki backup tools page: wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Backup_Programs.  I chose to try a few of them, I didn’t like arch-backup, backerupper didn’t really work the way I liked.  A few more just didn’t work for me.

I used rdup (continuation of hdup, or at least made by the same developer), which worked well, but not really for the large amount of data that I am backing up.  It is a VERY flexible tool (that actualy doesn’t back anything up at all!), so I tried a few different methods from creating a large .tar.gz file (26GB!), to incrementaly hardlinked backups, but I didn’t care too much for it.

#first method, creating a tarball
rdup ~/.rdup-backup-list $SOURCEDIR | rdup-tr -Otar | gzip -c -f > $DESTDIR

#incremental style backup
rdup-simple -zvmn ~/ $DESTDIR

In the end, I decided to go back to the tried and true, age-old: rsync.  I recently put something together at work to mirror a drive I use for my software application at another locaton, and I used rsync (by using cygwin to emulate a unix shell to run it on windows…but that’s another story).  So I use rsync to run incremental backups, and I run this nightly (with a cron entry). With these flags, if nothing is updated or changed, nothing changes.  Otherwise it copies only the changes.  It works great for me!

rsync -avzutmo --delete ~/ $DESTDIR

As a side note, my backup media is a USB external hard drive.