The December 2004 “Tech Support” column, “Quick and Dirty Backups,” combined tar and rsync to make light work of backup regimens. The notion was that an easy to implement backup solution would encourage you to perform backups and archive more often. To this day, however, most home and small-business users still ignore backups- and do so at great risk.
Even a rudimentary repository system is better than none, so let’s look at another simple solution based on rsync. (A future “Tech Support” column will cover a more robust, scalable, and open source solution, such as Zmanda.)
rsnapshot is a Perl- based utility for saving snapshots of local and remote filesystems. It uses rsync and hard links to create multiple, full filesystem backups, yet only requires slightly more disk space than a single snapshot plus incremental archives. rsnapshot is licensed under the GNU Public License (GPL) and is hosted at http://www.rsnapshot.org/.
rsnapshot is simple to configure and can allow an end-user to restore his or her files without administrator intervention. Further, rsnapshot can keep an arbitrary number of hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly backups for any number of hosts. Pair rsnapshot with ssh to securely backup any remote machine in the same manner as a local machine would be backed up. You also can run scripts both before and after backup, which is handy for preparation, such as dumping a database to the filesystem for subsequent archival.
After you’ve…
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