What tools do you use for Backups?

Software & Operating Systems Linux
,
1

Many in the forum have intricate systems and hardware configs, What tools do you use to back up, restore, clone, dump your file system? What do you do during a nuke and pave?

Include file system utilities like xfsdump lvcrete btrfs subv snapshot
External tools like fsarchiver rsync teracopy syncthing

Let’s hear it! What do you do to keep your files and projects safe and backed up :thinking:

1 Like
2

because ive been working with retro apple computers and my m1 i have my mac pro host a xserve raid san with 14tb that allows netbooting of my macintosh collection which handles hourly backups of each system and on top of that i have a a few drives i keep in cold stroage that make complete backups of the san and rotate every few months

this is based off apfs+ and hfs/hfs+

just the fancy tools in the xserve timemachine utl

all because i wanna play with my imac g3 that uses os9

2 Likes
3

If you backup all the files on your system, the only extra thing you really need for a restore is the output of sfdisk -d and maybe blkid. If you’ve got files with reasonably recent output of those commands, you can restore your system from bare metal. fsarchiver is effectively just like tar, only additionally saving the blkid information from the file system, instead of needing that extra step.

The information for your LVM layout is already stored in /etc/lvm/archive/ and can be restored onto disk from there. The options for mkfs for creating Ext2/3/4 partitions are in /etc/mke2fs.conf. Similar for mdadm (software RAID). Not certain about btrfs and zfs, can’t recall last time I restored one of them.

Someone could pretty easily put together a couple scripts to:

  1. Periodically run commands like sfdisk and blkid (and anything else required) on your system, and output to a standard location. And:
  2. Restore your full system from bare-metal, using those extra files, just as automatically as Ghost, Clonezilla, etc.

Those scripts could easily integrate with any backup utility, from AMANDA to borg, rsync to zfs send.

In fact, this is almost what Clonezilla does, already. It’s just limited to using less flexible utilities like partclone, instead of having options for tar, rsync, borg, etc.

1 Like
4

Backing up my workstation, I just use Veeam Endpoint to backup to a SMB share. All the important files are synced between my workstation, laptop and FreeBSD server, which then syncs with node off-site. Anything sitting on the server and off-site have ZFS snapshots configured, allowing for files to be rolled back quickly if needed.

1 Like