Re: Backups with rsync [Was: Is my root partition dying?] - luv-main

18 Dec 2015

On 17/12/15 23:06, Erik Christiansen via luv-main wrote:
...
  On 17.12.15 21:33, Russell Coker via luv-main wrote:
  There are a variety of backup systems that start
with rsync and manage
 trees of links.  It's not difficult to write your own, rsync the
 files, run "cp -al" to make a copy with hard links and use today's
 date in the directory name, and then delete backup directories that
 are too old.  
 I'm not grokking the benefit of doing the rsync _and_ a "cp -al". I just
 include -aH in my rsync options, the -H to preserve hard links. Seems to
 work. 
At my workplace, we use this rsync option:

--link-dest=DIR         hardlink to files in DIR when unchanged

where DIR would be the most recent successful backup directory.

I wrote aboute 500 lines of Bash for my workplace years ago which is
basically an rsync wrapper that also reads hosts and directories to
backup from a config file, and does some basic directory management to
make it easy to browse backups and see what you are restoring.

Today after reading this thread, I asked and was granted permission to
make the git repo public. It's a bit hackish, but it has served us
well and might be worth a look.

https://github.com/sitepoint/abs

Since it backs up hosts on the network using rsync over SSH via pubkey
authentication, we use the rrsync wrapper script (typically installed
at /usr/share/doc/rsync/scripts/rrsync.gz in the rsync package), with
authorized_keys files like:

command="/usr/local/sbin/rrsync -ro /" ssh-rsa <key> <host comment>

and

PermitRootLogin forced-commands-only

in the /etc/ssh/sshd_config option on targeted hosts to improve
security.

Cheers,
Adam