[BBLISA] System Backup thoughts and questions...

[Paul Beltrani]

On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 4:06 PM, Richard 'Doc' Kinne <rkinne at aavso.org> wrote:
> Hi Folks:
> I'm looking at backups - simple backups right now.
...
> job then does a simple "cp" from the NFS mounted production drive partitions
> to to the large, external, removable hard drive.
> I thought it was an elegant solution, myself, except for one small, niggling
> detail.
> It doesn't work.
> The process doesn't copy all the files. Oh, we're not having a problem with
> file locks, no. When you do a "du -sh <directory>" comparison between the
...

A couple of items to consider.

1) "cp" may not be the best choice for this.  "rsync" is a bit smarter
about only copying what has changed.

2) Bob Webber had a good suggestion about making sure the source and
destination trees really are different.  The "--dry-run" argument to
rsync may be helpful here.  Think of it as a "diff" for trees.

3) This method doesn't give you much opportunity to recover beyond the
last backup.  e.g.  You delete a file today.  The "backup" runs
tonight.  Tomorrow you realize you need the file that was deleted.  As
you said "simple backups" this may not be an issue at the moment.
However you may want to consider NOT deleting files on the target or
perhaps  keeping a few days worth of rsyncs.

  - Paul Beltrani