Caught Off Guard: Need a solid backup plan

[life0riley]

Glacier sounds like a reasonable option. No worries...not interpreted as a commercial. I have a pretty good understanding of the storage options now.

I also have a few software backup options to look at now, rsync and rdiff-backup included.

[andrewsimpson]

Coming into this thread a bit late, but here goes with some backup software:

rdiff-backup: http://rdiff-backup.nongnu.org/ Great incremental backup tool, and it preserves the current files intact so that you can see them on the backup server. Downside is that it doesn't seem to have a maintainer (but an active mailing list) and no encryption. You need to have rdiif-backup running at both ends (i.e. local machine and backup machine). Therefore it won't work on Amazon S3.

duplicity: http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ Incremental backup software. Works fine for me, but the files are encrypted and tarred on the remote server in blocks; you can't see the individual files. It does have a verification tool that lets you verify the blocks. As the local files change the remote backup gets incrementally bigger and bigger. The way to avoid this is to do a complete full backup every so often. For me, my connection is relatively slow, and this is painful.

s3ql: https://code.google.com/p/s3ql/ Incremental backup, encrypted and data-deduplication using sqlite. I have been playing with this and it's very impressive. Like rdiff-backup, you can see your files on the remote sever and retrieve the ones you want. s3ql has just had a serious corruption bug on (K)ubuntu 13.04. I reported it, and the maintainer fixed it very quickly and handled the issue professionally. I see the new packages come into 'updates' this morning. I was concerned that sqlite might not be up to real backups, but people on the mailing list seem to be using it for hugely massive data backups. Look for the example backup script in the project repository.

[life0riley]

Its never too late. Thanks.

I have a three day weekend, so I should have some time to try different backup options and see what works best for me.