On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 9:35 AM, Richard Murri <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, 8 Apr 2009 09:03:24 -0600 (MDT) > "Matthew Walker" <[email protected]> wrote: > >> >>On Wed, April 8, 2009 8:22 am, Jared Smith wrote: >>> On Sun, 2009-03-29 at 18:38 -0600, Byron Clark wrote: >>>> Sounds like rsnapshot[1] would meet your needs pretty well. >>> >>> I took a look at rsnapshot a few years back, but ended up choosing >>> rdiff-backup instead (for reasons I've since forgotten). I just >>> thought I'd throw it out there as another possible solution. >> >>I'm a past supporter of rdiff-backup, mainly because it compresses the >>diffs, so it uses less space. But this comes at a cost: It's a lot >>more work to recover an old increment than it is with rsnapshot. I'll >>be setting up a backup system soon, and I've decided to go with >>rsnapshot this time. >> > > My personal feelings here are that rdiff-backup is perfect for a workstation, > rsnapshot for a server or critical environment. > >
I used rdiff-backup in the past. I've switched to rsync/hardlink backups instead for a few reasons: - Nothing to install -- even Mac OS includes rsync and ssh out of the box. - I like to be able to view older snapshots without special tools. - I like to have more frequent recent snapshots, and less frequent older snapshots. For example, once a day for a week, once a week for a month, once a month forever. I don't think rdiff-backup can do this. You can only remove "anything older than X" with -remove-older-than. I've explored both rsnapshot and dirvish, but always end up rolling my own scripts instead. This is partly because I need some of my hosts to "push" the backups. rsnapshot and dirvish are both pull models. Currently I have numbered archives for daily, weekly, and monthly snapshots. Some day I'm going to write a "thinner" so that the archives behave more like Time Machine instead. If you haven't already read it, this web page has good info for rolling your own scripts. http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/ /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
