I was wondering if there is any good Linux free backup sw that will do scheduling, incremental etc. I want to back up several systems at home on a regular basis so if I do an upgrade I will have a roll back point.

I have been using Acronis for my Laptop but that required me to boot from CD and do the backup etc.

I dont mind on my laptop once a week or month or so but a server will be a pain to take it down. i could do 1 full then do backup or take it down before an upgrade and do a full back. or clone the disk etc.

Just some thoughts.

These are not production but it takes so long to backup and restore. I want to play with various things like kernel builds and upgrade processes etc. So I need a recovery point in case (yes I know I will) hoze it.
i do plan on putting up a www server for some club stuff I do so i want to be sure to back that up too.

I plan on RedHat, CentOS,Fedora,Ubuntu and may be Susi at some point.

Thanx for any incite pros/con etc you can offer

I'm not familiar with any of the "Big Tools" like Acronis and whatnot, but for scheduled incremental backups, I use rsync + cron. Simple and reliable.

i need a bare mettle restore option. I have a disk i can save the images to and boot cd or what ever if needed. but would like to make this a network based incremental/full backup bootable etc

Thanx for the info

found this link just dont know the sw
http://linux.about.com/od/softbackup..._Solutions.htm
http://www.foogazi.com/2008/02/25/fr...kup-solutions/

http://www.junauza.com/2009/01/7-bes...-software.html

http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

Lots of solutions.. Which one to pick...
anyone have good bad the ugly would help.

I was thinking backup pc but then i read this..

"Based on your site's requirements you need to decide what your backup policy is. BackupPC is not designed to provide exact re-imaging of failed disks."

So maybe thats not what I want to use

I'm surprised you have to boot from CD to do bare metal backups with Acronis. Maybe the Linux version is different; the Windows version allows backups to run as a background task, without reboot.

When I dual booted I backed up the whole machine, Linux included with Acronis, I still use it inside my Windows VM, but now I backup slackware with rsync to an external drive.

You can actually make a bare metal backup of a sort that way if you rsync the whole drive. All you'd have to do to get your system back is to boot from a live CD, remake your partitions, run rsync and reinstall the boot loader.

I have the windows version and just back up all partitions. I boot off the cd then select the full disk. I dont have server version.

I want to create a Linux system on an old PC and use that to backup to disk over the network at home. It will have either internal or usb attached disk. I also have a nas I might use.

I seem like Amanda and backup pc and bacula mondorescue, rsync, fwbackups keep coming to the top of the articles i am reading.
I would like to get a copy of Acronis for Linux but not spending 800+ on it for home.

I installed amanda-common on my lT but I dont see how to start it. Wanted to see what I looked like.

Ubuntu site does not say how to start it either. Not in any of my menu pull downs and no command in man etc.

I'll keep searching google...

when i did a find command on my LT:

/usr/share/doc/amanda-common
and
/usr/share/lintian/overrides/amanda-common

Found this..May be its only a cmd line interface??? I saw links with a gui
http://www.zmanda.com/quick-backup-setup.html

Hello,

As far as I remember Amanda is command line only, at least the free version is. It's not that easy to setup but once setup it runs very smoothly and requires very little maintenance.

You can have a look at this Quick start to get you going.

Kind regards,

Eric

To run Amanda, you typically set up your configuration and then use command lines and cron. Say you want to run backups every night at 10. Set up cron to run amdump at 10. If you were using tapes and wanted to have some feedback on whether everything was ready to go, you might run amcheck on cron at 3 in the afternoon. If there was anything that needed attention, it would send you an email. That way, you don't have amdump complaining in the middle of the night that something is wrong. Once it is set up, it can run for a long time without any need for attention. But, you should give it some attention just to assure yourself that everything is alright. Test some recoveries, etc.

Amanda is also extremely resilient to error conditions. I had a case where a tape drive in a library failed. I was caught up dealing with tech support, taking apart the library, extracting the drive, extruding a stuck tape (all under instructions over the phone), and I didn't have time to think about what Amanda might be doing. Amanda saw that it had no tape drive, dropped back and determined that it had enough space on the holding disk to do incrementals on everything, and did it. When I got the tape drive running again, Amanda saw that it was up, flushed the incrementals from the holding disk to tape, and then proceeded to reschedule the fulls that it had missed. I was completely covered. Smooth as silk, and no intervention required from me. Beautiful.

Anyway, if you are working with the community version, you can find most of what you need in help, FAQs, documentation, etc. on the wiki. A good place to start is http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Quick_start. Then jump out to other places in the wiki for more detail as you work your way through that. You should come to terms with Amanda's planner and how backup levels are used -- http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/FAQ...da_use_them%3F, and you might decide you want to use a rotation of virtual tapes or Amazon S3 -- http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/How_Tos#Data_Storage.

Be sure to come back with questions if you have any.

I should point out that while Amanda is my principle backup software, I'm really paranoid and really into redundancy. I use rsync between buildings in some cases, and Amanda backs up one of the copies. I use nightly ZFS snapshots for some file systems, and back them up with Amanda as well. I also have a cron that launches a daemon script that watches Amanda. Then when Amanda is done running, it copies the Amanda configuration and indexes to a disk archive and tars and scp's those to a server in another building. That server catches that archive in it's own Amanda backup the next time around. My tapes hold nightly backups going back 6 weeks with periodic archives that are kept indefinitely. I keep a rotation of tapes in a steel box in another building, and there is a bootable recovery CD in the box along with printouts of critical information like drive partition maps. Note that, if Amanda is unavailable, you can recover data from Amanda tapes using native tools like dd and ufsdump or gtar. I also use mirrored boot drives and raid6 data arrays. It's sort of like sitting around imagining all the things that could go wrong and then trying to cover for them. Also, test it. Take a spare machine and see what happens when you try to recover to it. But, enough. You can do your own experiments, both mental and real, that fit your environment.

I use a live linux distro that is more of a utility to make disk images that I then burn onto dvd's. I do not do incremental backups of any of my stuff because its really not that important. Then again I do all of this suff for fun rather then for a job :P

So everyone is talking about using amanda. Is this the most commonly used SW then? I pointed out several other SW but no one seems to talk about using them

I would just do weekly FULL or something like that. My LT is really the only thing with changing data so I could back that up with a script to a usb drive or something. But I do want a full rebuild image should it go bad etc. So If i back it up on a friday night once a week I am OK. I dont change the setting all that much.

I want a full image of any system I build at home so when I do upgrades play with it etc I can recover fast.

I wasted to much time recovering from a bad Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade. and am still playing with it. But it was not really a waste as it got me thinking about other things I was missing in my home environment. Like a backup solution Learning is good.

And I did learn a lot so thank you all.

I want to setup a Linux media sever at home so that too will be backed up I wont be using tape but local disk

What I also use, but that's not really in the form of backup is Acronis. I boot from the Acronis CD whenever I have significant changes to my system that I want to save to an image. That image gets saved to external USB disk and once every week, if there are no big changes, I just do an incremental copy. If my system crashes, I just boot from CD and restore the image to HD.

Kind regards,

Eric

yup thats what i am doing now. I was trying to avoid the boot from cd once a week thing if i could. I may not be home etc to do it so wanted it automated.