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- Jaymoon, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13I kinda have to say that GUI's help new linux users discover cool little gems of programs that they otherwise would have never known about.
If they see the name of a great program that is command-line based, they may try apt-get or similar to try and install it, and wonder where the heck it is once it's installed...
At least for me anyway, I feel a lot more comfortable with a GUI for a new program, rather than screwing something up typing in the wrong string into the command line.... - pkulak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Hey guys, just because there's another way to do something, doesn't make this way any less valid. Personally, I just use rsync in an AppleScript that I call every couple days, so there's no need for me to figure this thing out. But if I was looking for a backup solution, I would consider this.
- neko, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8I'm partial to rdiff-backup myself. One very small command gives you quick, smart incremental backups.
Although there's nothing wrong with GUIs - they are essential for new users. However, I prefer systems where the GUI is not essential. Take the mkvmerge gui for example - it offers all the usual buttons and combo boxes you'd expect, BUT it essentially just builds up the correct command line and runs it for you with a nice progress bar.
This is the right way to approach things, because you can then paste that command line into a script to automate things for you, or access functionality that might not have a corresponding button in the GUI yet. - schestowitz, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10Many Linux users never found the need for something such as a front-end for a task as fundamental as backup. Simple GNU utilities (even evailable in cygwin under Windows) like rsync do all the work flawlessly. With cron jobs, the whole routine can be automated and scripted as well.
- prammy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6This is actually kind of cool. Anything to simplify essential tasks is a good thing.
More than home users, this helps small businesses who are running Linux on at least one of their servers to make sure that the backups are run. You would be surprised at how many small companies do not perform proper backups just because the backup procedure is too complex and they cannot afford to hire a full time IT person.
Even with this backup solution in place, businesses should probably perform a backup to removable media such as a tape drive or CD backups which should be stored off-site for emergencies. - AviDardik, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4While initially these kind of programs look attractive, you'd be amazed just how simple it is to do it all by yourself instead of relaying on 3rd-party tools.
It's even better than FreeNAS and OpenFiler.
Check out the short and sweet guide: http://www.avidardik.com/2006/07/18/how-to-create-a-linux-backup-server-and-automatically-backup-your-windows-xp/ - mattvogt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3And rightly so. We use this on a corporate level and our users like being able to force a backup from a web interface. The compression is quite impressive, too.
- jstn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2BackupPC does not AFAIK, but if that's what you're looking for then you want amanda (amanda.org). BackupPC and rdiff both use similar hard-linking algorithms with rsync to archive nice compression.
I use BackupPC at work for 25 systems (Gentoo + WinXP + Macs) and it works flawlessly. I have a swappable SATA bay that I use to backup the pool to weekly, and rotate the weekly backups into a yearly archive.
As for moving a linux install to another system, a simple cp -vax works without a hitch every time. - CaptainFuture, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Superb! Was looking for something like this for a long time. Like someone else pointed out earlier, you can set this stuff up yourself, with or without a GUI. But there's only so many hours in the day and my To Do list is big enough as it is without another project ;-)
- epkphoto, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I use backuppc on my home network. It is a great tool for backing up multiple computers. I also have to agree that the restore options are quite convenient and well-implemented.
- NtroP, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2We use this where I work and it's great! First, the web interface makes it simple to do restores from anywhere without any special software. I can be sitting at a client's computer, pull up their web browser, log in to BackupPC and ask it to restore the needed files. The best part is being able to choose to restore it to the original location, another location, download it as a zip file or as a tar-ball. On the flip-side, I can give users their own login and password that allows them to backup or restore portions of their PC's on demand. We allow certain department-heads to manage their backups in this way. It is so easy to use, there is almost no training, and they have increased confidence in the system because they can check their backups or start a special backup after critical work has been done, and restore files any time they want without having to wait for Network Services to act on a work order. Quick, easy, painless.
One of he most compelling things about this though is that the more computers you back up the less aggregate space you take up on your backup system. It makes heavy use of hard-links so that it only backs up one copy of any given file, all other copies are just hard-linked to the first copy. Backing up that cool video everyone was passing around one takes up the equivalent of one copy. All those firefox and thunderbird installers people downloaded to their desktop, hardly take up any space. Depending on your population this can greatly reduce the amount of storage required. On one box we have almost 12 Tb of files backed up on to 2.5 Tb of drive space.
Another great feature is that every incremental is hard-linked to the last full in such a way that each incremental acts as if it were a full backup. To do a complete restore, you just go to the backup you want and restore. No more restoring the last full and then having to restore the incrementals.
Oh, and it's FREE, as in Beer and Speech! Much of it is written in Perl, which makes customization easy. We actually purchased a commercial backup software package (BrightStore) to run side-by-side with this for "critical" systems (and to appease management). In all the times I've had to restore data from either one, the only times I've had data fail to restore was from the very expensive commercial product. I have much more faith in BackupPC, because even if the program stopped working altogether, all the data is stored in file structures that mirror the locations they were backed up from. If worse came to worse, I can always navigate the backup pool to the file or folder I want and manually copy it to it's destination. Try that with a program that stores all it's files in a monolithic, proprietary file-structure which has lost it's index, or become corrupted. With BackupPC, if, for some reason, one file becomes corrupted, I can still restore the rest and I can eyeball every single file! If I ever need to destroy a copy of a given document due to retention policies, I can simply do a find, and a delete with a one-line shell script.
Now, BackupPC isn't going to work in all situations. You have to do extra work to get you backups encrypted, do bare-metall restores, backup live databases, etc. But, for what it does, it does very well, and we use it very effectively. - bevans, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Bacula is nice. I have been using both Bacula and BackupPC for a couple years now. They both do a great job of scheduling backups, rotating, etc.
BackupPC is great for people who need a nice, easy interface to restore or start backups from. This is handy because my coworkers can restore files themselves without my help. It is also more disk space & i/o friendly then Bacula.
Bacula on the other hand is the best product I have tested that works great on Windows (can backup open files) and Linux boxes alike. Bacula uses a little more disk space because it does not do polling. Also, it is not as easy to pull backups from.
If BackupPC was better at backing up windows, I would us it exclusively.
If Bacula had an easy to use web interface, I would use *it* exclusively.
Basically, they are both great products that do a great job at backing up servers & desktops. - kaeves, on 07/30/2008, -0/+1MRTG was great back in the day. Cacti is the new MRTG using RRDTool, which was created by the creator of MRTG. If you use MRTG, you really should check out Cacti.
- moduc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1
BackupPc is very good. It does not do disk imaging though. Only files. It's very easy to use with the GUI interface (web). Installation is a bit involved . Works well with windows and linux. Flexible configuration and scheduling. Some comment with "hacked up" script. This is for network backup with schedule, incremental and full backup. We had 2 disks. Swapping them in some interval and keep the other off site. - 1911, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I haven't used backupPC. I have used tar and rsync plenty. Not to detract in any way from the focus of the article or your favorite method of archiving, I would like to shine a light on Bacula [http://www.bacula.org/]. Just hearing about alternatives can be helpful. If you want to archive to disk, flash drive, dvd, tape drive or tape library and need to backup multiple machines, bacula is a very nice package. There is a bit of a learning curve for configuration and there is not yet a full gui. It easily scales from home office to enterprise. Bacula is centrally managed and makes restores a breeze. I currently manage archiving 2 TiB per night with bacula and am replacing a large farm of 15 rsync + tar to tape servers with a single server running bacula + tape library. So many people overlook the importance of reliable backups. With so many options available, you don't have to be one of them. Pick what suits your needs and make sure it can restore your data before you commit yourself to using it.
- campbe79, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Sure. But wouldn't it be more efficient if someone did it well and shared their work like this so we are not all reinventing the wheel? From what you are saying, every person who installs Linux should then have to go out and spend the time writing the same scripts/code/whatever that everyone else is writing.
I don't know about you, but I don't have a computer so I can spend time making the computer run the way I want. I only want to be using my computer when I'm working or maybe playing a game or just surfing. Take advantage of the fact that someone else put forth the effort so the rest of the world doesn't have to independently. - BobbyOnions, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Sorry, ran out of time to edit the last one.
cd /mnt/old
find . -print0 | cpio -pvdum0 /mnt/new
Or just use rsync:
cd /mnt/old
rsync -aPH . /mnt/new
rsync has the advantage of being interruptable and restartable but on very large filesystems with lots and lots of hardlinks then it can take AGES - BobbyOnions, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2You don't even need to tar it to a file, just boot from a live CD and do this:
(assuming /dev/hda1 is the old partition and /dev/hdb1 is going to be the new one and that it's ext3. change values to suit)
mkdir /mnt/old /mnt/new
mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdb1
mount -r /dev/hda1 /mnt/old
mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/new
cd /mnt/old
tar cvf - . | (cd /mnt/new; tar xf -)
Ta-da!
You probably want to use -H to preserve hard links too.
If you don't like tar then use cpio:
cd /mnt/old
cpio -pvdum /mnt/new - Namtaru, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I almost always try to run gui programs from the terminal, so I can see what kind of stuff its doing. That was I can see and learn new commands, and theres nothing wrong with using pretty checkboxes with lists of functions to run a program the way you want it to the first few times. After that, you will naturally find it easier to hammer out the commands with all the little -options you want, and lo you are allowed another tiny glimpse in to the complexity that is linux :P
- mattshoppes, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3The question is.. can this backup to tape.... probably not :(
- slithy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2You can easily move a linux install (to another drive/partition) just by tarballing up your partitions (making sure to preserve permissions) and then pop in a linux live cd and untar on a blank drive.
- domingomr1, on 05/29/2009, -0/+0Here is another promising tool, R1soft CDP Server 2.0 from R1Soft (http://www.r1soft.com/) a cross platform backup and disaster recovery software built to manage disk-based Continuous Data Protection for multiple servers and desktops, all from a centralized location. Tons of features, has archiving and it’s cheap. It’s great to find an affordable reliable solution to protect our data. The boss is going to love it :)
- SimonGray, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1For simple one-machine backups, rsync (GUI: Grsync) is probably the easiest to use.
- Halvy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Sbackup (Simple BackUp) was created during the Google Summer of Code in 2005.
It is: simple (no 'tuturial' needed), gui, comprehensive (includes networking, & logarithmic control of old data) and most of all, it works :) - kwilliam, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This looks exactly like what I need: Full and incremental backups, scheduling backups via cron, a GUI for configuration and a GUI for restoration. Exclusions can be defined by regular expressions, a maximum individual file size limit can be defined, etc.
It's all Gnome-centric, but I'll assume it works with KDE too. I'm definately giving this a try. - wmtrader, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2l'd like to get some feed back on what system or tool is best for backing up a Windows 2003 server with some applications that can not be shut down while backing up (I need an open file agent), that supports hot swapping USB drives, and is free. I have looked online but most of my searches lead me to commercial products that are out of my client’s price range or tools that I am not so sure about.
Also,
I would appreciate anything that I can use to log which employees visits which web sites, how often they visit a site, at what time of the day they visit a site, and is able to produce a report that a non technical person can easily understand. I have installed an Astaro 120 but the reports it creates are to technical for my client. I was thinking of a packet sniffer that generates reports based on IP but I have not found any such tool. This tool must also be free or cheap.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance. - havesometea, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0@wmtrader
There is no such tool that is free to accomplish what you want. By far the best one that I used was V2i Protector by Powerquest but then Symantec bought that product and destroyed it. I am in the process of evaluating some newer baremetal backup tools to see how good they are. Hopefully one of them is as good as V2i was.
And as far as watching your network goes...
http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/
This is a good place to start. - nullmind, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1Well... Theres also ext3 data journals that do this way better IMO.
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