Re: [tlug] Backup Software

[Nicolas Limare <nicolas+tlug@example.com>]

On Thu, Nov 25, 2010 at 05:22:45PM +0900, Edward Middleton wrote:
> On 11/25/2010 05:02 PM, Nicolas Limare wrote:
> >> Alternatively, do you have any ideas for a good backup tool
> >> I can use to backup the contents of various linux machines&  servers
> >> through the network?
> > 
> > When it comes to backups I always prefer to use simple, low-tech
> > tools, because when something fails or is missing when you need to
> > recover the backup, it becomes a nightmare.
> > 
> > My own solution:
> > * rsync everything from all the machines to a central backup server ...
> >
> > * on each backup server, make snaopshots with rsnapshot
> 
> How does rsnapshot handle permission and user name changes in
> snapshots?

Hmmm.. Good question. As rsnapshot is basically cp -l and rsync, so
after a few quick tests I think that when a file metadata (user,
perms, atime, ...) changes, rsync will change the attributes of the
files in its target directory. And as they are hardlinks to the
archived versions, the permissions will be changed for all the
identical snapshotted versions.

This is not a problem for me, but it may be one in other situations. A
workaround would be to collect and dump all the file attributes before
each backup, but going through the whole filesystems may be expensive.

-- 
Nicolas LIMARE
http://nicolas.limare.net/                         pgp:0xFA423F4F

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