Which backup tools should we use for linux?
Which backup tools should we use for linux?
You might scoff, but... btrfs send/receive is insanely fast and painless. To mitigate btrfs shenanigans, snapshots end up on non-btrfs filesystems too. I wrote a tool [2] which produces PGP signatures and sha512sums of snapshots to achieve reproducible integrity measurements regardless of FS.
Of course, in the time it took to polish up snazzer a bit for public release, many [3] other [4] cool [5] solutions [6] have materialized [7]... :)
[1] https://github.com/csirac2/snazzer
[2] https://github.com/csirac2/snazzer/blob/master/doc/snazzer-m...
[3] https://github.com/masc3d/btrfs-sxbackup
[4] https://github.com/digint/btrbk
[5] https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid/
No backup solution is perfect, anything including your backups can fail. The three rules of backups:
* If it isn't backed up you don't really care about it
* If you really care about something back it up using at least two unrelated systems, one or more remote and one or more offline (soft-offline will do).
* If you haven't tested the backups, you don't have backups.
> Which backup tools should we use for linux?
I'm still using simple hand-rolled scripts to manage backups via rsync (for an old but still good tutorial on that sort of thing see http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/) and (where consistency and/or downtime between backup start and end times might be an issue) LVM snapshots. I've needed tweak them a bit over the years as my needs have changed and as I've become more paranoid about the "testing backups" thing, but I'd have had to do that with other tools too.