[Discuss] full disk backups

[Jerry Feldman]

WRT: Restoring individual files. Rsync-based backups, such as rsnapshot and
backintime tend to be pretty simple. For instance, rsnapshot uses an
"hourly", "daily", "weekly", "monthly", and "yearly" snapshot. The way this
works is:
The "Hourly" is just when cron triggers it during the day. You can have any
number of these.
"Daily" is simply a rename operation. It renames the dailies to that
daily_0 becomes daily_1 ...
then renames the oldest hourly(as I remember) backup set to daily_0
Weekly, monthly and yearly do about the same.

backintime does a similar thing except the backup sets use a date-based name

Since each backup set is complete, you don't have to worry about
incrementals.

On Sat, Aug 17, 2019 at 2:03 PM Dan Ritter <dsr at randomstring.org> wrote:

> Eric Chadbourne wrote:
> >
> > I've been using Kali Linux Light for my daily driver.  Works great.
> However I need to make full disk backups and be able to recover since this
> is used for work.  I'm always screwing with it and if it's broken I'm not
> getting paid those hours.
> >
> > Any recommendations for something to use for a full disk backup and easy
> recovery?  My first thought was dd or rsync.  However Clonezilla looks
> pretty cool.  I remember years back one of their devs being on the BLU
> email list.
> >
>
> Several options.
>
> 1. dd
>     pro: simple, guaranteed to copy all state
>     con: guaranteed to read and write all state
>
> 2. rsync
>     pro: reasonably simple, restartable, more efficient than dd
>     con: lots of small files make it slow
>
> 3. rsnapshot
>     pro: reasonably simple, enforces cron usage, built on rsync,
>          multiple snapshots possible
>     con: same as rsync, plus multiple snapshots can make things
>          messy
>
> 4. use ZFS
>     pro: lightweight snapshots, zfssend/zfsrecv
>     con: not simple to set up
>
> 5. buy another machine and stop futzing with your work machine
>     pro: work machine remains stable, damage from futzing
>          limited to other machine
>     con: potentially expensive
>
> I have used all of these techniques.
>
> -dsr-
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-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Treasurer, Boston Linux and Unix
http://www.blu.org