| Quick and Dirty Backups |
| Posted by: jeremy on 03-07-2005. (333 views) |
TECH SUPPORT
Quick and Dirty Backups
by Jeremy Garcia
Everyone in IT knows that a good backup strategy is critical. The
unfortunate reality, however, is that all too many users -- from the
home to the enterprise -- don't yet have an adequate backup system in
place. If you can count yourself among that group, consider this New
Year's resolution: "I will back up my data."
When formulating your backup plan, ask yourself these questions: What
do I need to back up? How often does it need to be backed up? How long
will I need the data for? What medium would I prefer to backup to?
Armed with answers, you can begin to search for a solution that fits
your needs.
Your search may lead you to applications such as Arkeia, Amanda, and
dump, and a variety of storage mediums, such as DLT, DAT, and CDR.
Enterprise users will likely look into solutions such as Legato,
ARCserve, and VERITAS. Your backup needs should dictate the solution.
It's also extremely important that you fully test your backup (and
restore!) procedure after it's put into place. The worst time to
discover that your system is flawed is after data loss has already
occurred.
Here, let's focus on using two standard Linux utilities, rsync and tar,
that can quickly and easily backup data over a network (LAN or WAN) to
a hard drive on a remote machine. While rsync and tar lack some of the
more advanced features of other backup applications, the two tools are
simple to configure, free to use, and readily available. Chances are
that your Linux distrbution includes both.
The first utility, rsync, synchronizes source and destination
directories, either locally or remotely. One of rsync's greatest
strengths is that it only transfers the differences between two sets of
files, which saves bandwidth and transfer time. However, a major
drawback to rsync is that if a file becomes corrupted or is
accidentally deleted, rsync replicates the corruption or deletion. You
can somewhat mitigate this problem by syncing to rotating directories,
such as one directory for each day of the week.
The syntax for rsync is similar to that of cp. The basic command to replicate from a local machine to a remote one is:
code:$ rsync -e ssh -a --delete /usr/local/ backup jeremy@backup.host:/home/backups
This command recursively replicates the entire contents of
/usr/local/backup/ on the local machine to /home/backups/ on the remote
host, while preserving symbolic links, permissions, file ownership,
timestamps, and devices. -e tells rsync use to use a secure ssh
connection instead of rsh (the default), and --delete removes any file
from the remote side that no longer exists on the local side.
So, to use rsync as a backup method, simply schedule the above command
with cron, setting a frequency. Before you do that, though, make sure
that the password-less logins we set up using ssh keys in the July 2004
"Tech Support" (http://www.linux-mag.com/2004-07/tech_support_01.html)
are working. Without ssh keys, cron just hangs, waiting for your
password.
You can use the following script to rsync to a different destination directory based on the day of the week:
code:#!/bin/sh
BACKUPDIR='date +%A'
rsync -e ssh -a --delete --backup \
--backup-dir=/home/backups/$BACKUPDIR \
/usr/local/backup \
jeremy@backup.host:/home/backups/today
rsync is extremely flexible and has tons of options, so read its man page to tweak the examples to better suit your needs.
tar is a backup program designed to store and extract files from an
archive file, better known as a tarfile. Using tar for backup is easy:
just place everything you want to archive into the tarfile, and copy
the tarfile to another machine for safekeeping. This technique stores
every file every time, and lets you recover a file from an arbitrary
point in time. You can also use gzip to make tarfiles smaller.
The following script creates a compressed tarfile of the local
/usr/local/backup/ directory, places the archive in /tmp/ with a
filename that contains the year, month, and day, and copies it to
/home/backups on backup.host:
code:#!/bin/sh
DATE='date +%F'
tar zcpf /tmp/backupfile-$DATE.gz \
/usr/local/backup
scp /tmp/backupfile-$DATE.gz \
jeremy@backup.host:/home/backups
rm /tmp/backupfile-$DATE.gz
While neither rsync or tar alone constitute a comprehensive backup
strategy, both allow you to quickly and reliably backup content to a
remote machine using standard tools. They also make restores trivial. |
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