[TriLUG] rsync for Disaster Recovery?

[Douglas Ward]

We are using rsync rather heavily to remotely backup our mission critical
data.  There are two scenarios that we use:

1) Remote Linux server - We have a samba file server in a remote office near
Goldsboro.  This server uploads changes via rsync every night to a mirror
directory on a local server.
2) Windows/Linux servers - Here in the office we have multiple windows and
linux servers that will be rsyncing to an offsite server.  I am still
setting up the offsite server so for now it is on the internal network.

When I have finished this implementation I will switch everything in both
offices (main office in Raleigh and sattelite office in Goldsboro) to rsync
to the offsite server (in a third location).

Sorry for using so many words to answer your question with "we do!"  You are
supposed to be able to connect to Windows shares using samba but I was never
able to get it to work properly.  I had to set up a samba server and join it
to our domain as a member server.  After that I was able to mount all of our
important windows shares on one box that I designated as the windows rsync
server.  It works great.

On 12/1/05, James Brigman <jbrigman at nc.rr.com> wrote:
>
> Is anyone on this list using rsync to transport their data for disaster
> recovery? I've seen some effective UNIX/Linux backups/archives done with
> rsync, but I'm wondering things like:
>
> - how well can it be integrated with CIFS/Windows systems? (have I gotta
> roll a SAMBA server to translate so that rsync "sees" the windows data?)
> - is it relatively fast over slow links?
> - how well does it work with "incremental changing" data? Can you
> emulate "snapshots", for example?
> - anyone have to "reverse" the direction of the rsync data flow to
> recover the data, and if so, how easy was it?
>
> Experienced replies welcome....
>
> JKB
>
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