On 8/14/22 2:08 PM, Bill Cunningham wrote:
I just thought I would ask for opinions on backups that people
use. I have thought about the old fashioned dump/restore; IDK if that would be good for
modern use or not. My system isn't really that big. My allotted size is 30 Gig, and
it's not full. There's dar and xar and fsarchiver. There's backing up with
btrfs too.
I am thinking about back ups of the whole system and rpms I have installed. And
maybe not backing up logs, old settings like are stored in the root directory of the
user(s) and root account.
Does anyone use any of these or other backups? I just want to save my rpms and not
have to download all from scratch. IDK if dar or dump would backup things like /sys or
other system directories. I have created dump backups but not really restored from
scratch.
Bill
I've been using BackupPC for many years. It can use rsync via ssh for remote backups
or rsync directly for local (LAN) backup. It can automatically dedup as well.
I use it to do daily incremental backups and weekly full backups for 12 systems, Four
locally and eight remotely. A couple of years ago my workshop, office and server room was
destroyed in a fire. Because I had recent backups I was able to get the four servers I
lost back on-line and fully functional after only a single day scrambling to get new
hardware and rebuild the backup server. Note that I send compressed archive copies to a
remote server and that is what I used to restore the primary backup server.
I have never had a problem with backups and have successfully restored complete servers
and individual filesor directories for many years. My current primary backup server is
running on CentOS 7 and has been since CentOS 7 was first available, and on CentOS 6
before that. My secondary backup server is on my local Fedora workstation.
I'll be building a new backup server, probably on Rocky Linux 9, soon. I cannot
imagine using anything but BackupPC.
As for you wanting to backup your system's RPM files, BackupPC can be configured to
backup an entire server or workstation, or only parts of them including individual files.
For example I backup only /etc, /home and a few other critical directories on four
servers, and for each of them I cause a daily database dump and create a list of packages
currently installed, that also get backed up. It can take longer to restore those
servers, but as they are not critical infrastructure, I wouldn't matter much if they
were down for a day or two while we procure and rebuild those servers.
https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/
Emmett