On Fri, 2023-12-08 at 12:56 -0500, Tim Evans wrote: > Since tine immemorial (I first touched a UNIX system circa 1984), I > have > used the venerable 'dump' utility to do automated full and > incremental > backups to an NFS-mounted network storage appliance (NAS). > > Now, with a brand new laptop, with fresh install using btrfs > filesystems, I find 'dump' does not work on them. (Fortunately, I was > able to use the companion utility 'restore' to recover my /home > backups > and assorted config files from the root filesystem of my old laptop.) > > So, I'm looking re-script my backups using btrfs tools. So far, it > appears I cannot do btrfs snapshots to the NAS and I'm not wanting to > attach another disk to the laptop just for snapshots. Are there > analogous (to 'dump' and 'restore') btrfs utilities that can do > backups > this way, and can be scripted? Whenever someone asks about backup tools, there are usually lots of answers, so here's mine: I have BTRFS on my root and /home. My backup target is a USB-attached dual-slot caddy with a couple of drives in it. They are also BTRFS, and are formatted RAID-1 in case of hardware issues. My backup tool is Borg, because a) it's very feature-complete, b) does compression, and 3) does deduplication. I use it via an additional tool called Borgmatic, which takes charge of scheduling: $ rpm -qi borgmatic Name : borgmatic Version : 1.8.5 Release : 1.fc39 Architecture: noarch Install Date: Sun 03 Dec 2023 09:43:44 GMT Group : Unspecified Size : 1060831 License : GPL-3.0-or-later Signature : RSA/SHA256, Fri 24 Nov 2023 14:30:30 GMT, Key ID 75cf5ac418b8e74c Source RPM : borgmatic-1.8.5-1.fc39.src.rpm Build Date : Mon 20 Nov 2023 15:54:37 GMT Build Host : buildvm-x86-32.iad2.fedoraproject.org Packager : Fedora Project Vendor : Fedora Project URL : https://torsion.org/borgmatic Bug URL : https://bugz.fedoraproject.org/borgmatic Summary : Simple Python wrapper script for borgbackup Description : borgmatic (formerly atticmatic) is a simple Python wrapper script for the Borg backup software that initiates a backup, prunes any old backups according to a retention policy, and validates backups for consistency. Also: https://torsion.org/borgmatic/ Once I had it set up to my liking, I just let it run every night. Every morning I check (via logs) that it worked without problems. This has saved me more than once (either from hardware problems or from some poorly implemented change to my configuration). I've been generally happy with Borg. My main complaint is that the config file for Borgmatic is written in YAML, and you are assumed to know how this works (it's not obvious if you've never used YAML before). I used to use rsnapshot, based on rsync. It's somewhat easier to understand but doesn't do deduplication or compression. Something people often forget: can you actually restore files from your backup? Are you sure you know how to do this? Have you written it down somewhere that won't be lost in the event of disaster? poc -- _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
