amenditman Posted March 23, 2013 Share Posted March 23, 2013 I want to set up a backup system for my school laptop, my main computer, and my home file storage device. Clonezilla, a wonderful tool, is not what I want. I want something more flexible and faster. Here's what I am hoping it will do. 1 - Run a cron job on each computer once a week and make a local backup to external hdd and/or the home file storage device. 2 - Run a cron job once a month and make a backup of the home file storage device to my hosting account. Storage space is not an issue, I have tons, but compression would be nice. Time needed to make the backup is more important. I want to make the original run be a full restorable image of the entire hdd for each computer. Is there anything that will do that and then do incremental backups from there on? I would update it a couple times a year with a new full image to limit the number of incremental bits to add back in, in case of restore. Can I do this with just basic Linux tools? dd? rsync scripts? What else? I am in the early stages of learning all this stuff. What don't I know that I need to read up on? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted March 23, 2013 Share Posted March 23, 2013 Try this rsync command: https://wiki.archlin...utomated_backup I have used this for many years and it works beautifully. [root@Cerberus comhack]# crontab -l 00 15 * * * rsync -ar --delete /home/comhack/Videos /home/comhack/Music /home/comhack/Android /home/comhack/Documents /home/comhack/Downloads /home/comhack/Pictures /home/comhack/Shared /MEDIA &> /dev/null 01 0 * * 7 /home/comhack/.scripts/ipmon/ipmonitor.sh &> /dev/null Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abarbarian Posted March 23, 2013 Share Posted March 23, 2013 https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Full_System_Backup_with_rsync This article is about using rsync to transfer a copy of your "/" tree, excluding a few select folders. This approach is considered to be better than disk cloning with dd since it allows for a different size, partition table and filesystem to be used, and better than copying with cp -a as well, because it allows greater control over file permissions, attributes, Access Control Lists (ACLs) and extended attributes. [1] Either method will work even while the system is running. Since it's going to take a while, you may freely browse the web during this time. Worst case scenario you won't get the same opened tabs when you restore the backup (or boot from it) because they weren't saved. Not a big deal. The above wiki article might be of use as well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest LilBambi Posted March 23, 2013 Share Posted March 23, 2013 Well if you want an all around works with most everything type of backup scenario that is pay to play: Crashplan Works with Mac OS X and iOS, Linux, Windows 32 and 64-bit and Windows Mobile, Android, Solaris Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abarbarian Posted March 23, 2013 Share Posted March 23, 2013 Well if you want an all around works with most everything type of backup scenario that is pay to play: Crashplan Works with Mac OS X and iOS, Linux, Windows 32 and 64-bit and Windows Mobile, Android, Solaris Looks neat. You could use it with GPG and swap files with folks easily. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunrat Posted March 24, 2013 Share Posted March 24, 2013 +1 for rsync and cron. Make sure you do --dry-run first to make sure it works correctly. Not putting trailing slashes in the right place will have unwanted consequences. You can leave out the --delete option to save all copies of the files rather than delete older ones. It's not exactly the same as incremental backups though. I'm sure there are proper incremental backup progams for Linux but I can't think of them right now. Rsync guide & tutorial at Dedoimedo. He also mentions grsync which is a neat GUI frontend. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amenditman Posted March 24, 2013 Author Share Posted March 24, 2013 https://wiki.archlin...ckup_with_rsync The above wiki article might be of use as well. That is pretty close to ideal! Nice find. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted March 24, 2013 Share Posted March 24, 2013 I mirror my entire / and /home partitions of my primary operating system to backup partitions using rsync. The backups are 100% bootable from where they are stored. I do this manually, though. Most folks use some form of automation. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted March 24, 2013 Share Posted March 24, 2013 That is pretty close to ideal! Nice find. Well I have been using it for years but thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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