Re: [gentoo-user] Suggestions for backup scheme?

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Tue, Jan 30, 2024 at 1:15 PM Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Are there other backup solutions that people would like to suggest I
> look at to replace rsnapshot?  I was happy enough with rsnapshot (when
> it was running), but perhaps there's something else I should consider?
>

I'd echo the other advice.  It really depends on your goals.

I think the key selling point for rsnapshot is that it can generate a
set of clones of the filesystem contents that are directly readable.
That isn't as efficient as it can be, but it is very simple to work
with, and it is done about as well as can be done with this sort of
approach.  Restoration basically requires no special tooling this way,
so that is great if you want to restore from a generic rescue disk and
not have to try to remember what commands to use.

send-based tools for filesystems like brtrfs/zfs are SUPER-efficient
in execution time/resources as they are filesystem-aware and don't
need to stat everything on a filesystem to identify exactly what
changed in an incremental backup.  However, you're usually limited to
restoring to another filesystem of the same type and have to use those
tools.  There are some scripts out there that automate the process of
managing all of this (you need to maintain snapshots/etc to allow the
incremental backups).  There are a bunch of other tools for backing up
specific applications/filesystems/etc as well.  (Every database has
one, which you should definitely use, and there are tools like volsync
for k8s and so on.)

Restic seems to be the most popular tool to backup to a small set of
files on disk/cloud.  I use duplicity for historical reasons, and
restic does the same and probably supports more back-ends.  These
tools are very useful for cloud backups as they're very efficient
about separating data/indexes and keeping local copies of the latter
so you aren't paying to read back your archive data every time you do
a new incremental backup, and they're very IO-efficient.

Bacula is probably the best solution for tape backups of large numbers
of systems, but it is really crufty and unwieldy.  I would NOT use
this to backup one host, and especially not to back up the host
running bacula.  Bootstrapping it is a pain.  It is very much designed
around a tape paradigm.

If you have windows hosts you want to backup then be sure to find a
solution that supports volume shadow copy - there aren't many.  Bacula
is one of them which is the main reason I even use it at this point.
If you don't have that feature then you won't back up the registry,
and you can imagine how losing that is on a windows machine.  If
you're just backing up documents though then anything will work, as
long as files aren't open, because windows is extra-fussy about that.

-- 
Rich