Re: Thoughts regarding system-backups

[David Brownlee <abs%absd.org@localhost>]

On Fri, 30 Jul 2021 at 16:08, Todd Gruhn <tgruhn2%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
>
> I acquired a 500MB disk from a lappy.
>
> Ideas for a package to do system-wide backups?
> Can I put the backup in a specific dir -- ORRR must I use the entire disk?
>
> Thank you

I've had good experiences with dirvish - backing up both locally and
from remote machines. It uses rsync to create an exact (*) copy of all
the original files exactly as a directly tree, then for each
subsequent backup creates a hardlinked tree of the previous backup,
then rsyncs over any changes, so you only pay the on disk cost of each
changed file, while having entire directly trees of each backup. You
can also set how long to keep each backup (eg, default 7 days, sundays
for 12 weeks, 1st of month forever etc). There are much more
sophisticated packages out there, but it has very few moving parts to
break, and the backups can be accessed directly in the original
structure without any extraction tools.

I did have some issues with a nightly backup of data scattered across
several million directories onto a zfs filesystem at some point, but..
"Don't Do That".

(*) excluding hardlink count, for obvious reasons.

Unrelated: I'm also using syncthing (with file watch disabled) to keep
around 12TB of data synced/online backed up from one master to two
offsite copies, but thats a differnt use case :-p