On Tue, Jan 30, 2024 at 1:15 PM Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwa...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Are there other backup solutions that people would like to suggest I > look at to replace rsnapshot? I was happy enough with rsnapshot (when > it was running), but perhaps there's something else I should consider? >
I'd echo the other advice. It really depends on your goals. I think the key selling point for rsnapshot is that it can generate a set of clones of the filesystem contents that are directly readable. That isn't as efficient as it can be, but it is very simple to work with, and it is done about as well as can be done with this sort of approach. Restoration basically requires no special tooling this way, so that is great if you want to restore from a generic rescue disk and not have to try to remember what commands to use. send-based tools for filesystems like brtrfs/zfs are SUPER-efficient in execution time/resources as they are filesystem-aware and don't need to stat everything on a filesystem to identify exactly what changed in an incremental backup. However, you're usually limited to restoring to another filesystem of the same type and have to use those tools. There are some scripts out there that automate the process of managing all of this (you need to maintain snapshots/etc to allow the incremental backups). There are a bunch of other tools for backing up specific applications/filesystems/etc as well. (Every database has one, which you should definitely use, and there are tools like volsync for k8s and so on.) Restic seems to be the most popular tool to backup to a small set of files on disk/cloud. I use duplicity for historical reasons, and restic does the same and probably supports more back-ends. These tools are very useful for cloud backups as they're very efficient about separating data/indexes and keeping local copies of the latter so you aren't paying to read back your archive data every time you do a new incremental backup, and they're very IO-efficient. Bacula is probably the best solution for tape backups of large numbers of systems, but it is really crufty and unwieldy. I would NOT use this to backup one host, and especially not to back up the host running bacula. Bootstrapping it is a pain. It is very much designed around a tape paradigm. If you have windows hosts you want to backup then be sure to find a solution that supports volume shadow copy - there aren't many. Bacula is one of them which is the main reason I even use it at this point. If you don't have that feature then you won't back up the registry, and you can imagine how losing that is on a windows machine. If you're just backing up documents though then anything will work, as long as files aren't open, because windows is extra-fussy about that. -- Rich
