Backup of personal files

jeucken · 09-07-2006, 04:55 AM

Hi,

I'm running a SuSE 10.1 installation that acts as fileserver, FTP server en webserver.

It has 2 hard drives.
One is the 'system disk' (40 gigs - ext3)
The other is the 'data disk' (40 gigs - reiser) (mounted as /fileserver)

/fileserver is shared by Samba so it is available to my Windows PC. The dir has about 18 gigs of files.

What I would like to do is to make a backup of the fileserver dir and store it on the 'system disk' (it has about 28 gigs free).
I also want to run incremental backups so I won't have to keep making full backups all the time.
And, if it's possible I would like to split up the backup to files of about 4 gigs so it's easy to burn to DVD.

I think TAR is the best way to go here, but what would be the best way to use it?

I've found this little script searching through the forums:

Code:

#!/bin/bash

DATE=`date +%Y%m%d`
DIR="/backups/test/vol1R/current/"
BACKUPDIR="/backups/test/vol1/"

tar czvf - ${DIR} > ${BACKUPDIR}backup${DATE}.tar.gz

That would create a full backup.
But how will I do a Incremental backup?
And how do I split it up into seperate files for DVD burning?

bigrigdriver · 09-07-2006, 06:22 AM

Take a look at Dar (http://dar.linux.free.fr/). It has backup scripts (you can also write your own).

Dar allows you to make on monolithic backup, and split it later, or split as you backup. Restore is quite easy. File compression is good (my SuSE installation of 7 Gig compresses to about 3 Gig).

You can specify files to not compress (by file size or file extension).

The Dar tutorial has step by step instructions and command examples to use in creating your own script.

You can easily make full and incremental backups.

Dar archives each file individually, so that if one file is corrupt, you only loose one file. Unlike tar, in which you may loose the entire archive.

There is also a GUI frontend to Dar, called Kdar.

jeucken · 09-07-2006, 06:37 AM

Thanks

I'll look into it this evening.

motin · 09-07-2006, 06:50 AM

I'd bet on KDAR as well. It does a hell of a good job creating complex dar commands through a great GUI. I am writing a wiki article (http://wiki.motin.eu/BackingUpALinux...KillerStrategy) about using kdar for a total system backup. It will be finished in a couple of weeks. Feel free to share your experiences as well.

matthewg42 · 09-07-2006, 09:21 AM

I use kdar / dar for my personal system backups. Works nicely.

This is the list of file extensions I exclude from compression (because they're already compressed and re-compressing them takes a lot of time and yeilds minimal space saving):

Code:

*.avi *.bz2 *.gif *.gz *.jpg *.JPG
*.mp3 *.mpg *.mov *.ogg *.ogm *.png
*.qt *.rar *.rm *.sf2 *.sfpack *.tgz
*.wmv *.zip

If anyone can suggest more I'd like to see them - every time I backup I sit there watching some big ugly files spinning the CPU and not getting any smaller, and then afterwards I forget what they are!