Backup Central

Hi there,

I use rsnapshot for some weeks and it is a great tool. It is reliable and simple to understand. It holds the backup in a very simple format and so the simplest user understands it without a learning phase. Great!


But I found two problems I could not solve: One can't really use it to make backups of laptops. If I have the machine at this week connected only one day, I may get a very old backup as "weekly". So it is not very good if you "miss" to take some snapshots at the right intervals.

The other problem is related: If I make a monthly backup, depending on my configuration I will get a backup of the first or second Monday in the last month. It is not possible to make a monthly backup with the state of the first day of the month. For me it is essential to take a backup every month at the first at 0:00. This has to be before our monthly financial settlement and database consolidation.

For both these problems it would be nice if one could take the backup from a larger interval not from the oldest next-highest interval but the youngest backup. This will cost space one more snapshot worth.

I implemented this with a "youngest_for_interval"-Option. Now I take the "hourly" snapshot at 0:00, the "daily" at 0:15, the "weekly" at 0:30 and so on. Every run will create a new copy of the ACTUAL hourly-snapshot with "cp -al ...".

Is it true that rsnapshot could not do this before? Where can I send my patch? Should I send it here? Has anyone native-english-speaking a better idea to name the option?


Thomas Bayen

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On Mon, Jan 08, 2007 at 06:36:26PM +0100, Thomas Bayen wrote:

But I found two problems I could not solve: One can't really use it to make backups of laptops. If I have the machine at this week connected only one day, I may get a very old backup as "weekly". So it is not very good if you "miss" to take some snapshots at the right intervals.

Machines with intermittent connectivity will always be a problem I'm
afraid. With my own laptop I have it use rsync to "push" its filesystem
to a machine which has better connectivity every couple of hours. My
nightly rsnapshots then pick that up.

The other problem is related: If I make a monthly backup, depending on my configuration I will get a backup of the first or second Monday in the last month. It is not possible to make a monthly backup with the state of the first day of the month. For me it is essential to take a backup every month at the first at 0:00. This has to be before our monthly financial settlement and database consolidation.

For both these problems it would be nice if one could take the backup from a larger interval not from the oldest next-highest interval but the youngest backup. This will cost space one more snapshot worth.

I implemented this with a "youngest_for_interval"-Option.

I think that in your shoes I would come at this problem from a different
angle. I'd use a plain vanilla rsnapshot to do the usual
daily/weekly/monthly etc backups, which exist to protect you against
user error, sysadmin screwups, the building burning down etc. I'd then
run a seperate script to take hte "business" backup. That would run on
the first of the month and would rotate its *own* set of backups and
copy your normal daily.0.

That second script could even be rsnapshot, taking a monthly backup of
your normal snapshotroot/daily.0 and storing it elsewhere.

--
David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.
At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear
shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house.
-- Robert A Heinlein

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