a new slant on backups - backup with DAR..
i have been working for a few months on a way to backup our server so that the files are easy to access when needed, and easy to deal with at the same time.
for a long while, we used tape as a backup means. since we only have a few hundred gigs a day to backup, tape was slow, clunky for retrieval, and expensive..
we switched a few months ago to a pair of hard usb hard drives. each one has a 400g drive in it..
i have previously used ssh -> rsync to do the backups, but the 400g drives can no longer carry the whole thing.. i wrote a cron job in ruby that does all the work, but like i said, the drives are tapped out.
my first thought was to use the ‘compress’ option in rsync, but that does not compress the final destination, but only compresses the files as they are transferred.
i dug around yesterday, and found DAR this seems to do exactly what i need, other than run over ssh (it may well do this just fine, i will have to see..) right now, i just want to get something workable in place..
rsyncing all my files over now, and will try a DAR backup in a bit here.. the cool thing about DAR is that it will compress the archive.
if this sounds interesting, here are some links to some good stuff..
i really should spend some time going over the system to make sure it’s based on common libraries, etc.. but it seems pretty solid.
some concerns that i do have:
*how to script this so it runs a new differential backup each day.. i am not sure if i need to take care of incrementing the filename of the differential backup. i am not really too concerned with how to do it programatically, i just want to make sure i am not doing something that DAR might do internally, and more elegantly..