Hello,

Thanks for your help to everyone who replied. Initially, by "backup" I meant only a mirror, but if it is possible to do versions without needing 10 times more storage, that would be good too. Since it seems rsync is still widely used, I will stick with that for now and look into dirvish sometime soon.

Thanks again.

-- Aram


-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] on behalf of Klaus Wacker
Sent: Fri 10/16/2009 9:11 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Programs for backing up data?
 
On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 11:27:35PM +0100, Dr Andrew C Aitchison wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Oct 2009, Ken Teh wrote:
> 
> >You need to be clear about what you mean by backup.  If you are keeping a 
> >mirror of your data, rsync is fine.  But sometimes you want a version of a 
> >file from 3 months ago.  rsync is not going to do that for you.
> 
> I find that rsync with --link-dest is a good starting point for
> scripting multiple backups to the same disk (not the one you are
> backing up) which are good for recovering files in that scenario.
> 

My favourite backup utility is dirvish. It is based on rsync with
--link-dest, but adds a few nice things. One of those is an expiration
scheme. One can easily set up nightly backups which, e.g, normaly
expire after 2 weeks, but one backup per week will be kept for 3 months,
on per month for 1 year, and one every 3 months forever. Another one is
dirvish-locate.



-- 
Klaus Wacker              [log in to unmask]
Experimentelle Physik V   http://www.physik.uni-dortmund.de/~wacker
TU Dortmund               Tel.: +49 231 755 3587
D-44221 Dortmund          Fax:  +49 231 755 4547