[Discuss] On-site backups revisited - rsnapshot vs. CrashPlan

[Rich Pieri]

On Wed, 20 Feb 2013 17:15:57 -0500
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org> wrote:

> Setting up a checksum of a directory tree is pretty easy, You could
> keep them in a flat file at the same level where you archive is, so
> after hourly.0 is complete, set up an hourly.0.checksum. Just make
> sure you rotate it when rsnapshot rotates the directories.

This is a better idea than storing the checksums in a database. It
ensures that any given version of a file is always associated with the
correct checksum list.

I still maintain that Btrfs and ZFS handle this far more elegantly than
anything else out there.

> Also, rsnapshot has a decent logging mechanism. Unfortunately,
> rsnapshot assumes a Unix/Linux file system (hence hard links), so you
> really could not use it to back up a Windows file system in the same
> way.

Yes, you can. rsnapshot has been included with Cygwin since 2009 and it
works -- as far as rsync and GNU cp understand file systems. They do not
know how to deal with NTFS security semantics. While you will get
accurate copies of files you won't get correct security lists and such.
Which means that you can't use rsnapshot to make a bootable copy of
Windows or an accurate user profile. But the file data? That's just
peachy.

-- 
Rich P.