Spideroak One
Ask HN: How do you backup your linux system?
11–20 of 86 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your linux system?
#12I use rdiff-backup.[1]
"rdiff-backup backs up one directory to another, possibly over a network. The target directory ends up a copy of the source directory, but extra reverse diffs are stored in a special subdirectory of that target directory, so you can still recover files lost some time ago. The idea is to combine the best features of a mirror and an incremental backup. rdiff-backup also preserves subdirectories, hard links, dev files, permissions, uid/gid ownership (if it is running as root), modification times, acls, eas, resource forks, etc. Finally, rdiff-backup can operate in a bandwidth efficient manner over a pipe, like rsync. Thus you can use rdiff-backup and ssh to securely back a hard drive up to a remote location, and only the differences will be transmitted."
Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your linux system?
#13With rsync, using the --link-dest option to make a complete file tree using hard links to a remote server.
Cron runs it, on @reboot schedule. If the backup is successful, some (but not all) old backups are deleted. I delete some oldest preserved backups manually, if disk space runs low.
Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your linux system?
#14I've long used rsnapshot for automated incremental backups, and manually run a script to do a full rsync backup with excludes for /tmp, /sys and the like to an external drive.
Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your linux system?
#15http://www.snebu.com -- something I wrote because I wanted snapshot style backups, but without the link farm that rsync-based snapshot backups produce. Snebu does file-level deduplication, compression, multi-host support, files are stored in regular lzo-compressed files, and metadata is in a catalog stored in a sqlite database.
Only real things missing is encryption support (working on that), and backing up KVM virtual machines from the host (working on that too).
Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your linux system?
#16Put all personal data on a zfs z2 RAID system (FreeNAS). Take regular snapshots. Someday I'm going to get a second offsite system to do ZFS backups to, but so far the above has served well. Then again I've been lucky enough to never have a hard drive fail, so the fact that I can lose 2 without losing data is pretty good. I'm vulnerable to fire and theft, but the most likely data loss scenarios are covered.
I do something very similar, my oldest build gets synched once a year and is in cold storage. I hope I never need it. The hard drives from my previous build hold cold copies of the most valuable volumes (monthly sync), and the current system has plenty of redundancy and snapshots (insurance, not really backups). I use zerotier to stay in sync when away from home.
Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your linux system?
#17CrashPlan for /home
Plain old btrfs snapshot + rsync to local usb drive and offsite host for /etc, /var, /root
Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your linux system?
#18My laptop: rsnapshot to local USB disk, duplicity to remote server, git push for code.
My (two) servers: dump of db, rsync of dumps and files to another server.
It's ok only because I've got little data.
Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your linux system?
#19I don't back up the system. Drive failures are so rare nowadays that I will reinstall more often because of hardware changes.
The important stuff (projects, dotfiles) I keep on Tarsnap. I also rsync my entire home directory to an external drive every other week or so.
Similar for servers but I do back up /etc as well.
Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your linux system?
#20I've used clonezilla (http://clonezilla.org/). You create a bootable media (usb stick) then use that to clone to another drive/partition.