Re: Filesystem format for external hard disk

[Jeff Gipson <jeffagipson@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Where do you place your backups, Jeff? :-)
> 
> Paul
> -- 

Well, I just started using SpiderOak. Jury's still out. Their
deduplication and compression ratio seems pretty good (185GiB on my disk
becomes 145GiB in their system), and they support file versioning, but
don't seem to have a point-in-time restore feature. I think I can create
a script to do that, but I liked my old rsync backups better.

Also, you either have to run their GUI client *all* the time (or you
guessed it, no scheduled backups run) OR you have to run the client via
Cron in a headless sort of mode, when means (you guessed it... no GUI).

You can't run multiple instances of the client.

This limitation hasn't been an issue for me. I ran the GUI to configure
my backup selections, then quit the GUI and use cron to run the backups
on my schedule; But I can see this being a show-stopper for some people.

If I hadn't just bought a year in advance, I'd probably run the old
rsync script that I used to use which send the data over a VPN (or ssh)
link to a remote system. It created a hardlink structure which was handy
for point-in-time restores, i.e. on the remote system:

  backups/2012-01-01/DriveC
  backups/2012-01-01/DriveD
  backups/2012-01-02/DriveC
  backups/2012-01-02/DriveD

  etc...

With the exception of the first backup, all backups were incremental.
The result was that you could enter the folder for whatever day you
wanted and see all the files as they were on that date, not just the
ones that changed and were backed up. The rsync command was a monster:

  /usr/local/bin/rsync -az --stats --timeout=300 --progress \
                       --delete --delete-excluded --exclude-from="$6" \
                       --log-format="%t %f (%l/%b)" \
                       --link-dest="$DESTRT$PREFIX_TAG-Previous" "$RSYNCSHAR"
# then
  ln -sf "$DEST" "$PREFIX_TAG-Previous"

Of course the script set many of the other variables. I'd probably write
this script slightly different now (this script was written 8 years ago)
but the principle is the same.

  1) Do an initial backup with rsync an set the "previous" symlink to
  point to the destination folder
  2) Next day, create a new date-code-based destination folder, backup
  using rsync against the previous destination folder (see --link-dest)
  3) Update the "previous" symlink to point to the most recent backup
  4) repeat steps 2-3

My script was also kinda ugly, but it ran for years, and with the links
neatly arranges as described above, I was able to configure an apache
server to allow other users to browse and download old versions on their
own.
 
It's not perfect, I'm sure, but here's the whole script in context (for
educational purposes)

http://fpaste.org/ry7G/  <- note This paste will self-destruct by
tomorrow.

-- 
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  Jeffrey A. Gipson
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