Best practice / tools for backing up a server before production ?

[Cian Cullinan]

On 9/5/06, poweredge at pipeten.com <poweredge at pipeten.com> wrote:
> You might want to consider http://www.rsnapshot.org/ for incrementals.
>

Rdiff-backup is also nice, with the added ability to do "push"
backups, and not just "pull" backups which rsnapshot is limited to.
This is useful for example if you have laptops which you want to have
the ability to do backups even when they are roaming outside your LAN.
I currently use this to backup several servers, desktops, and a couple
of laptops. You can browse the last backup as a regular file system,
and with some simple commands you can call up any files from older
backups. Rsnapshot has the advantage of being able to browse all your
backups without any extra command invocations.
Mondorescue is an iso based backup utility (iso's can be written to
HD, CD/DVD's not required) that can do "bare-metal" recovery and
supports differential backups. I used this for a while and liked it a
lot, the ability to just burn off your backup isos, boot the affected
machine from them, and be fully back to where you were at the last
backup is REALLY nice. It's quite a bit of work to get comfortable
with it and get it set up exactly as you need it though.
I plan to move to backuppc over the next couple of weeks, it does
differential backups, has a nice web gui frontend, supports Macs,
Windows machines, and Unix boxes, and has lots of bells and whistles.
It's probably the closest competition to bacula AIUI.


Cian