[TriLUG] Hard drive recovery

Pat Regan thehead at patshead.com
Tue Aug 30 03:21:57 EDT 2005


Jeremy Portzer wrote:
> When we were considering backup strategies for the TriLUG cluster, we 
> considered rdiff-backup, but decided to go with the rsync / hard-linking 
> system (rsback script) instead, because it doesn't require a special tool 
> to recover the files.  This way, even if someone forgets exactly how the 
> backups are made (or another admin comes along who doesn't understand it), 
> they will still be able to easily recover from the backups simply by 
> copying files.
> 

You have to use the right tool for the right job, and for the expected
audience.

> I'm not saying rdiff-backup is a bad idea for all situations, as it 
> clearly saves some space versus the rsync/hard-link method (which is 
> especially bad for files that increase in size regularly such as log 
> files), but I'm a bit leery of relying on an extra, possibly hard-to-find 
> tool to recover my backups.  YMMV.

Rdiff-backup is GPL, written in Python, and depends on the LGPL library
librsync.  The web page claims it is six years old, and it has been in
the Debian Sarge repository for the two years I have used it.  The only
thing you need rdiff-backup to recover is the incremental backups, the
current full mirror is stored as regular files.

Pat
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