[nflug] Centos Backup Best Practices

[Christopher Hawkins]

I don't know the specifics about this and whether it meets your
requirements, but I have a client who has been using LoneTar for years and
swears by it. He won't use anything else, and I know it has saved him on any
number of occasions... It is not open source, though - I believe it costs
about $500.  http://www.cactus.com/index.php

Another interesting tool that I have used a little bit is MondoRescue.
http://www.mondorescue.org/docs/mondorescue-howto.html 

This one is open source, and has some pretty good user interfaces which make
it easy to get up to speed and try it out without a huge learning curve. A
nice feature is that it generates a boot cd which you can use in conjunction
with your other backup media (tape, disk, cd / dvd, NFS, etc.) to easily do
a bare metal recovery. 

Good luck, 
Chris

> -----Original Message-----
> From: nflug-bounces at nflug.org 
> [mailto:nflug-bounces at nflug.org] On Behalf Of Erek Dyskant
> Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 9:46 PM
> To: nflug
> Subject: [nflug] Centos Backup Best Practices
> 
> Howdy All,
> 	I've been using rsnapshot (an rsync-based backup 
> script) for backing up CentOS servers, and was very happy 
> with it.  It does efficient backups that use native 
> filesystem targets, so it's easy to restore specific files, however:
> 	I just ran a full restore dress rehearsal, and found 
> that rsync doesn't copy selinux contexts, so I had to disable 
> selinux on the restored machine before it would boot.
> 	So, does any of you know of a good backup tool that can 
> do network-based incremental backups, and that backs up all 
> of the filesystem metadata?  Another requirement is that 
> there need to be tools to access specific files or 
> directories (If it doesn't use the native target's filesystem 
> like rsnapshot does) from any of the snapshots without doing 
> a full restore.
> 	Thanks for the help.
> 
> Cheers,
> Erek
> 
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