On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 12:06 PM, Philip Prindeville <philipp_s...@redfish-solutions.com> wrote: > > > The drive is a WD 3 TB USB 3.0 drive formatted as ext4 in a single partition > (sdc1) and it is mounted (via /etc/fstab) at boot time. It isn’t intended > for any other purpose but backups. > > I’d like to do regular backups, with the capability of either a bare metal > restore of a machine (assuming a boot from a recovery ISO image or else an > alternate /boot partition on the host), as well as backing up some high churn > server state (like /var/svn on an SCM server, or /home for various CI > [continuous integration] users I’ve set up).
You have a lot of special cases here. Aside from the glaring problem that a single failure of several types (hardware/admin/software) could wipe all your copies at once, backuppc won't be great at most of those cases. In particular, it doesn't do bare metal by itself and it won't do the atomic updates that your svn transactions expect. > I’d like to do full backups at least twice a week, and hourly incrementals. Maybe... There's quite a bit of overhead even for incrementals as it has to walk all the directories to rebuild the directory tree and copy changes - and even an rsync copy is expensive when you have large changed files. Once or twice daily is more realistic. > Are you suggesting I use amanda, or a cron/dump script instead? Those won't be a lot better. Clonezilla or ReaR would handle your special-case of bare-metal restores. Subversion's own svnsync or hotcopy would handle a subversion repository correctly. But, you would be much safer with a 2nd system doing the backups over the network. >> >> Are you looking for something like Apple's Time Machine? > > > My understanding was that Time Machine was more oriented towards user data > backups, and not a server scenario with a large amount of data which churns > frequently. Files are files... But some things need special handling. Time machine has a 'bare metal' advantage in that any new install of OSX already knows how to restore from it. Backuppc gives you an approximate equivalent of a tar image but you need a working installation to read it. -- Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dive into the World of Parallel Programming The Go Parallel Website, sponsored by Intel and developed in partnership with Slashdot Media, is your hub for all things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to news, videos, case studies, tutorials and more. Take a look and join the conversation now. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net/ _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/