Hi, I am trying to come up with a modest, cheap, and simple backup system for some of our servers & workstations here. This will be basically a kind of home-grown thing, rather than spend the money for commercial backup system. We have one server that's going to have a rather big storage space for this purpose (about 400 GB) with RAID. So here's my plan: For every remote server / workstation (or a directory in the remote machine, eg /home), I want to create a : 1. Full backup on day 1 to the backup server. 2. Write the full backup to media (either CD-R or CD-RW or DVD-RW, haven't really decided yet), and leave the data in the drives in the backup server 3. Differential backup on day 2 to day 7 4. Remove lask week backup from Harddrive, then Goto 1. For step 1 and 2, I can use something like rsync, or rsnapshot, or even mondo-rescue which will nicely create the ISO files for me directly for the remote machines that I backup. So the first two steps is not terribly hard. Now for step 3, I don't know what to do, and can use some recommendation. Is there an open source utility out there that will do this differential backup? I am thinking about storing this differential backup in different directory everyday, like day0/, day1/, day2/ etc. I've googled, and only come up with: http://rdiff-backup.stanford.edu/ I'll try that, but I'm wondering if people here knows some other, or can recommend some other. The advantage of doing this is so that I can have one week versions of changes on the machine, and can go back to specific day during that week to restory. I know the disadvantage is to restore could be more difficult, and after a week, data cannot be recovered to specific day, but we're willing to live with that (what I have now is even worse because I only have mirror for backup, with incremental backup every day). So our requirement is pretty simple. I know that some people here have been in this game for probably longer than I live :), so I can use advice or criticism for the plan. And as I said before, I also need a recommendation of a utility that can do differential backup. ps: I've read, and skim over the book Unix Backup and Recovery (very nice book BTW), but unfortunately, unless I'm missing something, it does cover differential backup utility in depth (or at least the free/open-source one). Thanks in advance for any help. RDB -- Reuben D. Budiardja Department of Physics and Astronomy The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN --------------------------------------------------------- "To be a nemesis, you have to actively try to destroy something, don't you? Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect." - Linus Torvalds - -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
