Rsync Backup

[DoobyWho]

I was looking @ http://www.unix-serve.com/content/view/15/1/ and was trying to figure out what he was talking about w/ the hardlinks. How would you go about setting this up?

See, what I would like to do is:

Sunday Night - Delete last complete backup. Do a complete backup (where I can restore everything, including PHP/Apache/MySQL/Plesk) once a week to my second hard drive. SSH this backup to another server.

M/T/W/F/S - Do an incremental backup everynight that does NOT remove files that don't exist.

Thursday - Do an incremental backup everynight that does remove files that don't exist.


That way we have a few days to delete any accidently deleted files before they are deleted from backup.

 

[mian]

http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/ should be able todo what you want, you can run it over ssh ie; server mode on your hosting box and client mode from your backup box using rsa keys for unattended mode.

todo what you want you could write a script that sets the backup directory to the date of the last Sunday

ie;
/backups/2005-08-07
/backups/2005-08-14
/backups/2005-08-21

then crontab it for once a night which will force a full backup to be done automatically every Sunday because the directory wont exist yet then Mon-Sat will use the same directory doing incremental backups. this would allow you to keep say 4 full backups for a month which you can then manually delete or make the script delete older ones for space

 

[DoobyWho]

What directories should be included? If I backed up everything except for /proc and my HD crashed... would it restore everything in working order (PHP/MySQL/apache/Plesk)?

 

[jamesyeeoc]

I was looking @ http://www.unix-serve.com/content/view/15/1/ and was trying to figure out what he was talking about w/ the hardlinks. How would you go about setting this up?

It would depend on if he was referring to the '--link-dest=DIR' option (unchanged files are hard linked from DIR to the destination directory) or the '-H, --hard-links preserve hard links' option of rsync. This would be better asked on his forum board to get clarification from him.

If I backed up everything except for /proc and my HD crashed... would it restore everything in working order (PHP/MySQL/apache/Plesk)?

Short Answer: Assuming the 2nd drive was prepared with the same OS/Plesk versions, partition scheme/layout, and is bootable, then as long as everything was being sync'd regularly, in the event of primary drive failure, you should be able to swap the 2nd drive in place of the 1st and go.