[TriLUG] Hard drive recovery

[Jeremy Portzer]

Pat Regan wrote:

> I always see lots of people using rsync in various ways to do backup,
> and it is a very good idea.  Have you ever looked at rdiff-backup:
> http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/

> I have been using it for about a year and a half now, and it is
> wonderful.  Instead of storing whole copies of changed files, it stores
> a binary diff of the changes.  It can be a little bit CPU intensive
> though, since it has to diff any changed files.

When we were considering backup strategies for the TriLUG cluster, we 
considered rdiff-backup, but decided to go with the rsync / hard-linking 
system (rsback script) instead, because it doesn't require a special tool 
to recover the files.  This way, even if someone forgets exactly how the 
backups are made (or another admin comes along who doesn't understand it), 
they will still be able to easily recover from the backups simply by 
copying files.

I'm not saying rdiff-backup is a bad idea for all situations, as it 
clearly saves some space versus the rsync/hard-link method (which is 
especially bad for files that increase in size regularly such as log 
files), but I'm a bit leery of relying on an extra, possibly hard-to-find 
tool to recover my backups.  YMMV.

Jeremy

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