Max Pyziur wrote:
I have a home network with a server (used as the DSL router, gateway)
where I have some spare disks to which I copy/ftp/smbclient stuff from
the various home machines.
I suspect that with the amount of digital content I'm accumulating,
though, that there are better/improved ways and would be interested in
reading others' recommendations and practices. Or even recommended links.
Well personally I find rsync an excellent tool for backups. I have a
server with about 550GB of storage which I use to backup my machines
using rsync. I do a 100% backup of every machine. The nicest feature is
that rsync will only backup anything that's changed since the last
backup run.
On a client machine (assuming linux) I have something similar to the
following in /etc/rsyncd.conf
---------------
motd file = /etc/rsyncd.motd
log file = /var/log/rsyncd.log
pid file = /var/run/rsyncd.pid
dont compress = *.gz *.tgz *.zip *.z *.rpm *.deb *.iso *.bz2 *.tbz
*.lha *.lzx *.rar *.img *.dms *.cab *.mp3
hosts allow = 192.168.1.2
[root]
comment = "The entire filing system"
path = /
list = true
read only = true
uid = root
gid = root
exclude = /dev/shm/* /media/* /mnt/* /proc/* /tmp/* /sys/*
-------------
I have the rsync service enabled (/etc/xinetd.d/rsync), which contains:
------------
service rsync
{
disable = no
socket_type = stream
wait = no
user = root
server = /usr/bin/rsync
server_args = --daemon
log_on_failure += USERID
}
------------
Then on the server when I do a backup I use the following (from a script)
rsync -av --delete --ignore-errors rsync://<machinename>/root
/backup/<backupdir>
You can of course adapt/script things to your own needs, but this works
very well for me and it's used to backup Linux, Solaris, MacOS X and
Windows machines.
--
Ian Chapman.
