Re: [gentoo-user] rsync backup system

[daid kahl <daidxor@gmail.com>]

On 26 February 2010 01:11, Ward Poelmans <wpoely86@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 16:41, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:
>> A much better way is to run a dedicated agent on the client. If the server
>> needs to schedule backups, it can ask the agent to do so using regular tcp
>> traffic. The client can then do it's backup and rsync it over to the server
>> when it's done, and that push can be done as a regular user on both ends. The
>> actual backing up on the client must be done by root of course, no other user
>> has the necessary access.
>
> Sounds great. Is there any software that works this way?
>
> Ward

Sounds more or less like cron tasks and rsnapshot to me (can use other
rsync scripts of course, but this one is nice to me anyway, and
someone else mentioned it earlier in the thread).  I'm not sure off
hand I have a good way for it to be initialized from the server end,
but if it's a backup, it might as well run on a local cron anyway
rather than needing an external call.

As a simple idea, cron task starts rsnapshot configured however.  When
this is done, backup is tarballed, and tarball is given as like, say,
440 permissions, where users are in some useful 'backup' group, then
while tarball can be read to be passed across server, if tarball is
extracted, user has no more privs then they have on the system anyway
(I'm not saying chmod -R).  Then local tarball can be removed or
whatever.

And call me silly for not reading documentation or assuming, but I was
very happy last night when I realized system rescue CD includes
rsnapshot already!

~daid