On 2019-11-12 13:34, Ulli Horlacher wrote:
I need a new backup system for some servers. Destination is a RAID, not
tapes.
So far I have used a self written shell script. 25 years old, over 1000
lines of (HORRIBLE) code, no longer maintenable :-}
All backup software I know is either too primitive (e.g. no versioning) or
very complex and needs a long time to master it.
My new idea is:
Set up a backup server with btrfs storage (with compress mount option),
the clients do their backup with rsync over nfs.
For versioning I make btrfs snapshots.
To have a secondary backup I will use btrfs send / receive,
Any comments on this? Or better suggestions?
The backup software must be open source!
Borg [1] backup on the clients. That will get you:
* Automatic 'versioning' without needing snapshots.
* Automatic compression and deduplication of the backups (without
needing BTRFS to do either).
* Automatic encryption (if you want it).
* The ability to mount your backups like a filesystem (through FUSE).
* All in a layout that's reasonably friendly to copy between systems
with tools like rsync or rclone.
Borg's big thing is that it does reference-counted deduplication of the
individual blocks of the backup, so incrementals take up next to no
space or time but still give you a full view of the backed up filesystem
with each snapshot. It also has support for accessing a backup server
over SSH, which is a bit more efficient than using something like NFS.
For the copy to the secondary backup, you could just use rsync to mirror
the backups done with Borg (or alternatively, us rclone to mirror them
offsite to cloud storage).
[1] https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
