[TriLUG] Your State of Practice for Backups?

[Brian]

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 10:04 AM, Shawn Hartsock <hartsock at acm.org> wrote:

> We're reviewing our backup strategy for our Linux servers. My company
> is running Ubuntu dapper on over 40 servers. Currently, our backup
> system resembles this:
> http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2003/03/06/nfs_backup.html
> ... but I'm curious what are other shops doing? How do you handle
> this? And, how would your advice change if I told you that we're
> expecting to double the number of servers in the next 12 months?
>
> BTW: average size of a full backup of one of these servers is around
> 4.8G and we're likely to only maintain 1G of salient differences
> between the various servers as each server is custom configured and
> installed per client.
>
> --
> /** Shawn.Hartsock  //*/
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I've had good experiences with rsnapshot- it's easy to set up and is fairly
flexible. It's an incremental backup tool- it creates a folder with a full
backup (just a copy of the specified directories), then creates new folders
with hardlinks to the original files every time it does a new backup. Each
backup folder looks like a complete backup, but the the hardlinks limit
space consumption to only the files that change between backups. It supports
snapshot rotation as well, so you can keep a few dailies, plus a copy from a
week ago, etc. without any trouble.

I've also heard good things about Bacula, rdiff-backup, and Duplicity.
Bacula, I understand, is well-suited for medium/large-sized corporate
networks, so it should handle your higher server count pretty well. If
you're going to back up 80 servers, though, I would recommend looking into
deduplication technology to reduce the size of your backups (but
recommending tools for that is a job for someone on the list who has worked
in much larger environments than I).

-Brian