[OpenIndiana-discuss] rsync & snapshot backups?

[Ken Gunderson]

On Fri, 2011-04-29 at 14:40 -0400, Dan Swartzendruber wrote:
> Here's a question for y'all.  I have two linux servers I want to back up 
> to my OI NAS/SAN.  What I've been playing with is a simple script that 
> runs on the OI box, and does an ssh to each of the linux servers, with 
> the command being an rsync back to the OI box.  rsyncd on OI is setup to 
> allow connection from each specific IP for the filesystem in question.  
> Each stanza in the rsyncd.conf file has a post command hook that takes a 
> snapshot with the date&time on the end.  I've been googling for how 
> others do this, and have found a number of competing solutions, none of 
> which seem to do all of what I want.  Frex: snapadm.pl, which creates 
> rolling backups on daily/weekly/monthly basis with retention times - so 
> far so good, but it doesn't actually do any backing up.  I also found 
> rsbackup (based on freebsd?) which does the backing up, including 
> snapshotting, but doesn't seem to have any kind of snapshot expiration.  
> etc etc etc...  I was even thinking of switching from text-mode OI to 
> the GUI so I can install time slider - that would work if there was some 
> kind of script I could tell it to run before doing the snapshot (and 
> said script would run the rsyncs).  At this point, I feel like I'm 
> standing out in the field trying to figure out which way to go :)  Any 
> thoughts?  Thanks!

Baccula would perhaps be overkill, but get you what you're after in
terms of expirations, pre & post scripts, etc.  A bit more complex to
set up for small onsie and twosie networks but then again once done it's
pretty much autopilot from there on out.

Amaanda could do similar but last time I evaluated open source
enterprise backup solutions Baccula was the clear winner for my needs.
Amanda has since seen some developer love so would be worth taking a
fresh look.

-- 
Ken Gunderson <kgunders at teamcool.net>