After years of messing with backup scripts I have finally set up a decent backup system, courtesy of backuppc. Backuppc is a set of backup scripts too but much better than I could have knocked up.
Backuppc runs on a server and backs up client pcs over a network. It doesn't need any client software but supports various kinds of net file shares so it can, for example, backup windows pcs through smb file shares. The administration program is web based so you can run it anywhere.
It runs as a server pinging the clients once every hour. If it finds a client is running and if it hasn't been backed up then it runs a full or incremental backup according to it's schedule.
The files from a number of pcs are copied into a pool so that multiple gigabytes of windows bloat files only get stored once so it becomes quite efficient on space.
For each pc you can browse the daily backup archives going back for months. You can select a directory to restore and download a tar or zip file of the contents of the directory.
I've got it backing up all my systems:
- web sites including photos and git repositories
- personal documents, including scans
- irreplacable family photos
- iTunes music collection including all my rips
- /etc directory of all my Linux boxes
- loads of crap from /home/peter that I can't be bothered to filter out: better to accidently back up too much that to accidently filter out something irreplacable.
This is for:
- the home server box where backuppc runs backing up itself
- dedicated server over then VPN
- home desktop
It all adds up to 22gigs. I then rsync this archive to a second disk so my backups are disk-proof. I may dump it to a USB disk that can be grabbed if the house burns down (offsite backup isn't feasible).
Backuppc doesn't support tape backup which suits me as I don't have a tape drive. It can't do 'bare metal' restores but I'd rather reinstall the os and applications after that kind of failure, backuppc is backing up the data which is where my time is invested.
The backup pools include images of the original directories that wet backed up, albeit with an f at the start of every file name. I like this, it's not as if the files are locked inside some proprietary black box.
There are other free network backup systems such as amanda and bacula but they seemed more tape orientated and complex than backuppc.
I have my clients running rsync daemons so after the first backup the updates, both full and incremental take a minute or two for gigs of data. Since I run Linux I don't notice if my pc is being backed up while I am using it.
It's something I should have set up sooner as I really feel as if for the first time I have proper backups in place.


