[NBLUG/talk] talk idea (backing up your system)

[Osiris Pedroso]

Hi Aaron,

I currently have a nice setup and my backup works! :-)

It is based on rsync, the best tool I have found so far for doing my kind of
backup.

Basically, what I call backup is to be able to replace a system on short
notice with the important files (not necessarily image) of the computer in
question.

I have a Samba server with an USB 160Gb drive at the office and a second
Linux server with another USB 160Gb drive at home.

All machines at the office (6 currently) backup to the Samba server's 160Gb
drive. The Samba server has a cron job to backup the 160Gb drive to the home
computer's 160Gb disk drive.

This way, even if I had a flood or some other natural disaster happen at my
office location, I could get replacement computers and with the home's 160Gb
drive, recover all the important files to the new computer at the time it
takes to plug this USB drive to the new machine and rsync it back.

As one of the files backed up I also have a ghost image of each computer
with the basic development tools we use already installed.

Why rsync? Because it makes incremental copies of file contents.
We also use it to transfer CD ISO images. Sometimes just a few files are
modified. Rsync will send only the changed blocks in the ISO image.

All the information is encrypted while in transit (rsync is ssh based), and
using private/public key pairs let me not even allow passwords on the home
ssh setup and it all works.

I won't be able to attend your presentation (I live in Brazil now), but I
would love to get a copy of it.

Osiris
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 -----Original Message-----
From: Aaron Grattafiori [mailto:nite at sonic.net] 
Sent: Monday, February 13, 2006 8:16 PM
To: General NBLUG chatter about anything Linux, answers to questions,etc.
Subject: [NBLUG/talk] talk idea (backing up your system)

Hey all...
I have thought about doing a talk on open-source backup methods in the
near future (3+ months away). Things like doing backups of drives to
other drives.. backing up using scripts, backup laptops to servers over
the network, etc. I'd talk about some different ways to do things and a
little about the various protocols. I'd probably  do a live demo
(network or local) and release a perl script that would have some pretty
strong functionality. I'd also like to cover encrypting your backup
image or drive, as well as compression and verifing integrity.

(has this already been covered at nblug?)
Is this something you would be intrested in hearing about?
Is this something you've had trouble with?
Is this something you currently are wondering about or you already wrote
a script ?
Anything you would like to hear about in specific?

thanks for any and all input,

 -Aaron Grattafiori