Sat May 3 11:02:10 EDT 2008
Backing up with Faubackup
Recently on HPR
Episode 85, deepgeek spoke about a pretty cool backup utility called
faubackup. Up
until I heard of this little utility I had been running a script with a string
of tar commands which worked sufficiently but seemed somewhat limited. I
wanted to keep several copies of the backup to keep a history in case I needed
to go back farther than just the last couple of backup. This meant I needed
gobs more space than I had, and that I had to write a script to rotate around
the actual tar files. I had this working sort of but never felt like I could
just stick it in cron and let it do it's thing. Thus my backups were being run
only every so often which is just asking for trouble. Months old backups are
just a tad better than no backups at all. Faubackup so far seems to be picking
up the slack in my horrible scripting skills quite nicely.
Faubackup is just an apt-get away in (k)ubuntu but in Slackware I had to build a slackbuild script. For some reason the standard ./configure && make && make install didn't put all the files in where they needed to be. The default /etc/faubackup.conf file is pretty good. The only change I made was to change the default location of where backups should be put. The default number of backups it keeps are 2 yearly backups, 12 monthly backups, 4 weekly backups, and 7 daily backups. Initially this seems like it would take a huge amount of space but the cool thing about faubackup (and other similar file backup solutions I'm sure) is that it will hardlink to the original file rather than making a new copy if it hasn't changed. This saves tons of hard drive space.
Since it's a command line utility it's easy to automate via cron. I just put a script with the faubackup commands in it that I want and call that from roots crontab. To make this all a better backup solution I should really periodically tar up one of the backups made by faubackup and store it on tape or DVD somewhere off site.
One last thing faubackup can do is remote backups via rsh or ssh. To do this you have to install faubackup on both the system being backed up and the system doing the backup. To do the backup via ssh just changed the rsh in the conf file to ssh. The only thing with this is you have to provide a password every time you run the remote backup unless you setup ssh keys with out a pass phrase which is a potential security risk.
So far I like faubackup. You should check it out.
Faubackup is just an apt-get away in (k)ubuntu but in Slackware I had to build a slackbuild script. For some reason the standard ./configure && make && make install didn't put all the files in where they needed to be. The default /etc/faubackup.conf file is pretty good. The only change I made was to change the default location of where backups should be put. The default number of backups it keeps are 2 yearly backups, 12 monthly backups, 4 weekly backups, and 7 daily backups. Initially this seems like it would take a huge amount of space but the cool thing about faubackup (and other similar file backup solutions I'm sure) is that it will hardlink to the original file rather than making a new copy if it hasn't changed. This saves tons of hard drive space.
Since it's a command line utility it's easy to automate via cron. I just put a script with the faubackup commands in it that I want and call that from roots crontab. To make this all a better backup solution I should really periodically tar up one of the backups made by faubackup and store it on tape or DVD somewhere off site.
One last thing faubackup can do is remote backups via rsh or ssh. To do this you have to install faubackup on both the system being backed up and the system doing the backup. To do the backup via ssh just changed the rsh in the conf file to ssh. The only thing with this is you have to provide a password every time you run the remote backup unless you setup ssh keys with out a pass phrase which is a potential security risk.
So far I like faubackup. You should check it out.