rdiff-backup is my backup tool of choice

I decided to actually get backups going. I know, laugh. But I bet that when you snicker, you may also not have a great backup system in place.

Picked up a 160GB 2.5″ disk and an external casing. After careful calculation, it seems like maybe I could have saved money buying a pre-packaged solution. Weird.

Anyways, the tool of choice – rdiff-backup. Its simply dead easy to use. Just do: rdiff-backup <current> <backup-path>. My initial backup of about 56GB of my home directory, it took just under 2 hours for the first ever backup image.

Restore is something a lot of folk seem to forget. They make great backups, but never test restores. I went cold turkey – moved from Fedora to Ubuntu after a backup. It worked.

Only real problem is that in Fedora, I had uid/gid 500, but in Ubuntu, I was uid/gid 1000. That’s easily fixable, I restored (rdiff-backup -r), and I have my environment exactly as per before the format (and distribution switch).

I probably should try to do these backups daily, and maybe have even more that one drive for backups, but this is me being very appreciative of rdiff-backup. Today I ran it again after over a week.

time rdiff-backup /home/byte/ /media/disk/byte/

real    288m40.943s
user    52m1.951s
sys     12m57.641s

rdiff-backup also works over the network. Those dreamhost accounts are now starting to look very interesting for off-site storage. Read the documentation and examples if you’re wanting to get up to speed really quickly. Its also OS X compatible. Now if only I found a sensible Windows backup system…

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4 Comments

  1. Rob Weir says:

    If you’re looking to backup to an untrusted machine, you might want to try Duplicity: http://duplicity.nongnu.org/, howto: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/209 (though read the comments – the bit about seperate keys is wrong). Like it says, “Encrypted bandwidth-efficient backup using the rsync algorithm”.

    If you want to backup both locally and remotely, you can use a file:// URL for the duplicity destination, then rsync (or scp or whatever – new backups just produce new files that need to be copied) that wherever you like.

  2. byte says:

    Thanks. I’ll definitely now take a gander at that. Its probably useful since I’d want to use an untrusted dreamhost account…

    BTW, I’m on Ubuntu on my main desktop now. Just about 2 years since you convinced me :0)

  3. wahlau says:

    and 2 years after i made the switch from fedora to ubuntu :)

  4. aubs says:

    i am using 2nd copy 2007 for windows. does a great job and is free (almost) will keep running as long as you dont need to create new scripts after the run date…. check out:

    http://www.secondcopy.com/

    ps: where is the web 2.0 webpage for bytebot???


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