Re: Simply Backup help
Callan Davies wrote: I've found it works really well, but I can't say I've ever tried a restore. I really would try that ;-) That is probably the biggest problem with backups - people find they can't restore. This could be for a variety of reasons (media, setup ...). You should be able to restore to some other area than the original. You will also have been through it before when you come to the heart flutter situation of really needing to do it ;-) Just to add another option into the mix. I've used Amanda (http://www.amanda.org/) for years. It is trickier to set up and all command line stuff. I use an external USB disk. Prior to that I used tapes. The backup does selected partitions from all machines on the network. I've pulled out individual files from backup and unfortunately had to recover an entire partition. One nice thing is that the backup format is basically a tarball with some info on the front. You can skip passed that initial info to have a normal tarball. With some backup solutions (mainly priority) you end up with some format where you need the original software. Regards ...Peter -- ubuntu-au mailing list ubuntu-au@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-au
Re: Simply Backup help
On Tue, 2009-03-31 at 15:13 +1030, Callan Davies wrote: I have loaded the system monitor as you have suggested and now have the the little window on my panel. Couldn't find Load and Disk but I'll work that out. You comments are pertinent and encouraging. Thanks again. Hi Dave, Right-Click on the system monitor panel applet and choose PREFERENCES from the popup menu. Set the update interval to 500ms, and make sure you put ticks in CPU, LOAD, DISK, and perhaps NETWORK. Cheers :) CD Got it. Thanks Callan. -- ubuntu-au mailing list ubuntu-au@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-au
Re: Simply Backup help
Simply Backup all goes well to the point of pressing the backup now button and the A backup run is initiated. The process id is message is displayed. After that, there is no sign of activity - that I can see. I presume that it is working in the background. Though it doesn't present a time line or any other message to say where or what is going on. I don't know if/when it is done. 1. What do I do after the A backup run is initiated. . . . message? 2. Does it work reliably? 3. Is there a better product/process? 4. Any other comments? Hi Dave, I use SimpleBackups at home, plus two other networks that I manage. All three locations have data on a NAS device, and back up the the local machine. I use the 'custom' backup settings, with a full backup every 30 days. I use logarithmic backup retention. Basically everything seems to work fine. My suggestion would be to add the system monitor applet to your panel, and configure it to show CPU, Load and Disk. Then go to Simple Backups and click the RUN BACKUP NOW. Hopefully you see the graphs start to do something! The RUN BACKUP NOW button just starts a manual backup, which I always do for the first run. Then I just let it run its own schedule after that. I've found it works really well, but I can't say I've ever tried a restore. One function I would love to see, is some sort of log file, log email or on-screen notification that backups have (1) started, (2) completed, (3) failed. Right now, it's possible to shut your machine down in the middle of a backup and you'd never know until you tried to restore data that was not there. Hope my comments have helped. Cheers Callan -- ubuntu-au mailing list ubuntu-au@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-au
Re: Simply Backup help
When thinking about backups you need to ask yourself what you are protecting against. Do you want to protect yourself against a hard drive failure? Though not a backup raid mirroring can help reduce the effects of this. you could do a copy of all the data on one disk to another disk in the same machine. do you want to protect against theft or fire? You can rsync your files to a remote machine. you can backup to a tape or an external hard drive and leave a copy at home, at your parents house etc. do you have databases? you will need to run a database tool to create a backup or do an export of the tables first. an os copy of the data files would not work as the database may be writing the file during the copy and you would get an inconsistent copy. do you need protection against file corruption? some backup methods only keep one version of the file, if you make a mistake and create a bad version of the file you may not have a copy to go back to so make multiple backups or use a system that supports versioning. how frequent do you need to back up? what type of machine is it? I would probably have 2 types of backups, a full system backup and a backup of some of the things that frequently changes. The full backup would just start on your / and move forward. some advanced systems will do a lvm snapshot to ensure you get a consistant backup from the time the snapshot was taken. I would do this atleast once a week, maybe daily maybe once a month it depends on your needs. For the daily frequent backup i would backup just the important information to you. It may just be your home directory for your pc maybe your /etc as well. if you run a web server bakup your /var/www, if you have a database, do an export and backup the backup files. I have a vm at work, i do a daily tar backup of my /home and a weekly tar on my /. if you are working on a project a versioning system would be a good idea to keep track of changes and allow you to go back to a previous change. here is my script: #!/bin/bash BACKUPDIR=/media/cifs/dns/backups BACKUPFILE=$BACKUPDIR/ubuntu-full-`date +%Y%m%d`.tar.gz LOGFILE=$BACKUPDIR/ubuntu-full-`date +%Y%m%d`.log BACKUP_RETENTION=+14 dpkg --get-selections /home/dns/installed-packages echo beginning backup at `date` $LOGFILE tar --exclude=media/* --exclude=proc/* --exclude=storage/* --exclude=dev/* --exclude=sys/ --exclude=lost+found/* --exclude=mnt/* -czvf $BACKUPFILE / $LOGFILE 2 /dev/null echo finished backup at `date` $LOGFILE -- ubuntu-au mailing list ubuntu-au@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-au
Re: Simply Backup help
On Tue, 2009-03-31 at 11:10 +1030, Callan Davies wrote: Simply Backup all goes well to the point of pressing the backup now button and the A backup run is initiated. The process id is message is displayed. After that, there is no sign of activity - that I can see. I presume that it is working in the background. Though it doesn't present a time line or any other message to say where or what is going on. I don't know if/when it is done. 1. What do I do after the A backup run is initiated. . . . message? 2. Does it work reliably? 3. Is there a better product/process? 4. Any other comments? Hi Dave, I use SimpleBackups at home, plus two other networks that I manage. All three locations have data on a NAS device, and back up the the local machine. I use the 'custom' backup settings, with a full backup every 30 days. I use logarithmic backup retention. Basically everything seems to work fine. My suggestion would be to add the system monitor applet to your panel, and configure it to show CPU, Load and Disk. Then go to Simple Backups and click the RUN BACKUP NOW. Hopefully you see the graphs start to do something! The RUN BACKUP NOW button just starts a manual backup, which I always do for the first run. Then I just let it run its own schedule after that. I've found it works really well, but I can't say I've ever tried a restore. One function I would love to see, is some sort of log file, log email or on-screen notification that backups have (1) started, (2) completed, (3) failed. Right now, it's possible to shut your machine down in the middle of a backup and you'd never know until you tried to restore data that was not there. Hope my comments have helped. Cheers Callan Thank you so much Callan, I have loaded the system monitor as you have suggested and now have the the little window on my panel. Couldn't find Load and Disk but I'll work that out. You comments are pertinent and encouraging. Thanks again. Dave. -- ubuntu-au mailing list ubuntu-au@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-au
Re: Simply Backup help
I have loaded the system monitor as you have suggested and now have the the little window on my panel. Couldn't find Load and Disk but I'll work that out. You comments are pertinent and encouraging. Thanks again. Hi Dave, Right-Click on the system monitor panel applet and choose PREFERENCES from the popup menu. Set the update interval to 500ms, and make sure you put ticks in CPU, LOAD, DISK, and perhaps NETWORK. Cheers :) CD -- ubuntu-au mailing list ubuntu-au@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-au
Re: Simply Backup help
On Mon, 2009-03-30 at 18:24 -0700, daniel sobey wrote: When thinking about backups you need to ask yourself what you are protecting against. Do you want to protect yourself against a hard drive failure? Though not a backup raid mirroring can help reduce the effects of this. you could do a copy of all the data on one disk to another disk in the same machine. do you want to protect against theft or fire? You can rsync your files to a remote machine. you can backup to a tape or an external hard drive and leave a copy at home, at your parents house etc. do you have databases? you will need to run a database tool to create a backup or do an export of the tables first. an os copy of the data files would not work as the database may be writing the file during the copy and you would get an inconsistent copy. do you need protection against file corruption? some backup methods only keep one version of the file, if you make a mistake and create a bad version of the file you may not have a copy to go back to so make multiple backups or use a system that supports versioning. how frequent do you need to back up? what type of machine is it? I would probably have 2 types of backups, a full system backup and a backup of some of the things that frequently changes. The full backup would just start on your / and move forward. some advanced systems will do a lvm snapshot to ensure you get a consistant backup from the time the snapshot was taken. I would do this atleast once a week, maybe daily maybe once a month it depends on your needs. For the daily frequent backup i would backup just the important information to you. It may just be your home directory for your pc maybe your /etc as well. if you run a web server bakup your /var/www, if you have a database, do an export and backup the backup files. I have a vm at work, i do a daily tar backup of my /home and a weekly tar on my /. if you are working on a project a versioning system would be a good idea to keep track of changes and allow you to go back to a previous change. here is my script: #!/bin/bash BACKUPDIR=/media/cifs/dns/backups BACKUPFILE=$BACKUPDIR/ubuntu-full-`date +%Y%m%d`.tar.gz LOGFILE=$BACKUPDIR/ubuntu-full-`date +%Y%m%d`.log BACKUP_RETENTION=+14 dpkg --get-selections /home/dns/installed-packages echo beginning backup at `date` $LOGFILE tar --exclude=media/* --exclude=proc/* --exclude=storage/* --exclude=dev/* --exclude=sys/ --exclude=lost+found/* --exclude=mnt/* -czvf $BACKUPFILE / $LOGFILE 2 /dev/null echo finished backup at `date` $LOGFILE Thank you Daniel, I will quietly work my way through logic and decide, indeed, what it is I ultimately want to accomplish. Script frightens me a little but, I guess I will have to quietly (again) go through it to understand what the commands are doing - before I copy it. I appreciate the fulsome help and advice you have provided. I'll let you know how I go in the end. Regards Dave -- ubuntu-au mailing list ubuntu-au@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-au
