Backup Central

Hello,
I was wondering if anyone had implemented backup rotation. We have two
external USB hard drives that we would like to rotate weekly to ensure
an offsite backup. What techniques do you use for snapshot rotation?
Is it best to simply bring in the offsite hard drive once a week and run
a disk cloning, or should I just rotate the hard drives and let
rsnapshot manage the diffs? It would be nice not to have to fumble
around the different hard drives in order to restore a file at a certain
point in time. My backups are running around 250GB right now, so the
less full cloning, the better.

Thanks in advance.


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On 2/8/06, Michel Gallant <support < at > mindsweep.ca> wrote:
should I just rotate the hard drives and let
rsnapshot manage the diffs?

If I were doing a reliable weekly rotation, I would probably set
things up to start at weekly for the rotated drive, and run it as a
separate rsnapshot config and snapshot root. Basically, swap the
drives on Friday or something, and run the additional rsnapshot pass
on Sunday morning.

Since I'm not reliable (I rotate mine _about_ once a month, this is
personal data), I manually clone the weekly-and-higher data. But I'm
not super-enthusiastic about my system, I can see that I'm going to
regret not having it completely automagic, and getting things in the
right order so that all the hardlinks are shared is annoying, at best.
rsync can't just do the entire dir in one pass, because there are
about 25 snapshots and it wants _far_ too much memory. I could script
it, but I don't quite trust that comparing the directory timestamps
isn't going to bite me someday.

An option I've been considering is to have rsnapshot handle the
hourly/daily, but then to have a separate script periodically steal
the oldest daily and name it weekly.20060205, then keep the weeklies
forever. This would make scripting the cloning much cleaner, because
directory names wouldn't be shifting around, and I can afford the
space, at least for a year or so.

-scott


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