On Wed, 11 Dec 2007, Joost Kremers wrote:

>
> Joel J. Adamson wrote:
>> What's the best way to do this? Everything I've found on the net is for
>> people looking to clone or back up an entire system. I just want to
>> preserve my few precious data directories, all on my /home partition.
>
> rsync i think would be the standard utility.


I use rsync to fully sync all machines weekly, I do a 'rolling 7 day'
daily and a weekly TAR of /etc /home and a few other critical dirs
depending on what server/desktop it is and config files such as linux
src's .config, sendmail.mc and so on, so backing up is a cp -a
of the disk and extract the most recent tar of configs and home etc ...

If you have databases, I do a 'rolling 24 hour by 7 days' (yup 168
backups) mysqldump backup [ warning: requires huge disks unless your
DB's are small... ] I also do a daily tar backup of the
/var/lib/mysql/mysql directory, all the sqldumps in the world wont help
you much if you screwup your mysql access Well ok its easy enough to
recover, but I find it faster to do it this way... I also keep a copy of
all this on the database server as well (saves times and hassle by
avoiding logging into and copying the dump to the db server then loading
it, ok, so it might only save 15 seconds, but those seconds can mean
missed business for customers.

Although rsync is fantastic and has saved my ass on more times that I
care to remember with failed disks, it only takes you to go away for the
weekend, and miss one 'run' (or 2 if you use the backup option) and you
can't recover as the runs that occured when you weren't there, has synced
the corrupted file(s) or deleted the missing one(s).

All backup scripts are in perl and use Mail::Sendmail to let me know if
somthing fails.



--
Cheers
Res

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