Jayce
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I've been a long time fan of rsync, so whenever I set up a new system at home I'd create a directory for that system on my storage drive and would rsync to it accordingly. Someone asked me yesterday why I use rsync and not rdiff-backup. After some discussion I began to consider that maybe rdiff-backup is the way to go. rdiff-backup essentially works like rsync in that it provides a current mirrored copy of the data, but it also contains deltas which are incremental changes of the data in question. That means I don't really ever lose my data. If I delete something on client and rsync, it's gone. If I delete something on client and rdiff-backup, I can still retrieve it.
After some testing, it seems pretty sweet. Last night I ran my desktop and my wife's laptop through the motions by simply running:
rdiff-backup --exclude /home/jason/.gvfs /home/jason jason@192.168.1.200::/media/storage/jason/desktop-ubuntu
The exclude is necessary because if I have any Samba shares mounted, they populate in .gvfs. If .gvfs gets caught in the backup process it causes a loop since it'll effectively back up that directory and all of its networked contents as well. Then /home/jason is the source with jason@192.168.1.200::/media/storage/jason/desktop-ubuntu being the destination.
If I run rdiff-backup -l against the destination directory, it'll show me which incremental backups are available. Then I can rdiff-backup -r (for restore mode) and list the date/T/time of the incremental backup to restore it accordingly. You can also run rdiff-backup --remove-older-than 5D /backup/destination/directory to remove all incremental backups older than 5 days, for example. In a short time I was beginning to see the benefits of rdiff-backup over rsync.
That being said, rdiff-backup doesn't seem to be the default answer for people. Most people will say they use rsync or rsnapshot. I got to wondering if any of you fellas use rdiff-backup without even giving it a second thought.
One thing I had trouble with was finding a GUI for rdiff-backup. I often like to find the GUI equivalent for whatever tools I come across in case people ask for it. With rsync, it's Grsync, etc. It seems easy enough to run the command through its paces though. I ended up just adding it to a bash script and added it to startup applications within Ubuntu, but you can just as easily cron it to run it at a specific time. It also appears as if you can back up an entire root file system, which is appealing to me on many levels, but I'm still looking into this to get more info on it before I test it on any root file systems.
It also appears as if rdiff-backup works on Mac, Linux, and Windows. This is obviously a sure fire +1. I haven't tested it yet, but I've definitely read references about it. Food for thought.
So, what say you, fellas? Any rdiff-backup users that I wasn't aware of? If not, what do you use to back up? Whether it's CLI or GUI based, I'm interested.
After some testing, it seems pretty sweet. Last night I ran my desktop and my wife's laptop through the motions by simply running:
rdiff-backup --exclude /home/jason/.gvfs /home/jason jason@192.168.1.200::/media/storage/jason/desktop-ubuntu
The exclude is necessary because if I have any Samba shares mounted, they populate in .gvfs. If .gvfs gets caught in the backup process it causes a loop since it'll effectively back up that directory and all of its networked contents as well. Then /home/jason is the source with jason@192.168.1.200::/media/storage/jason/desktop-ubuntu being the destination.
If I run rdiff-backup -l against the destination directory, it'll show me which incremental backups are available. Then I can rdiff-backup -r (for restore mode) and list the date/T/time of the incremental backup to restore it accordingly. You can also run rdiff-backup --remove-older-than 5D /backup/destination/directory to remove all incremental backups older than 5 days, for example. In a short time I was beginning to see the benefits of rdiff-backup over rsync.
That being said, rdiff-backup doesn't seem to be the default answer for people. Most people will say they use rsync or rsnapshot. I got to wondering if any of you fellas use rdiff-backup without even giving it a second thought.
One thing I had trouble with was finding a GUI for rdiff-backup. I often like to find the GUI equivalent for whatever tools I come across in case people ask for it. With rsync, it's Grsync, etc. It seems easy enough to run the command through its paces though. I ended up just adding it to a bash script and added it to startup applications within Ubuntu, but you can just as easily cron it to run it at a specific time. It also appears as if you can back up an entire root file system, which is appealing to me on many levels, but I'm still looking into this to get more info on it before I test it on any root file systems.
It also appears as if rdiff-backup works on Mac, Linux, and Windows. This is obviously a sure fire +1. I haven't tested it yet, but I've definitely read references about it. Food for thought.
So, what say you, fellas? Any rdiff-backup users that I wasn't aware of? If not, what do you use to back up? Whether it's CLI or GUI based, I'm interested.
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