Simple Backup

I have been managing small computer installations (5 to 200 computers on a site) for over 20 years, and backup strategy is always critical. There are zillions of commercial products available, and some very useful commercial services. But if you do not trust someone else with your data, and if you do not care for the complexities of most commercial backup solutions, its nice to know you can roll your own and end up with something very robust.

My requirements include:

Server-based configuration. Do all of the configuration management on the server instead of having to do it at each client.
Simple, one-time, non-intrusive client configuration. Drop a package onto the client, start a service, then forget about it.
Server-initiated backups. Do not expect that users will put things onto a file server to have their stuff backed up. Do not expect users to run software on their computer in order to do backups.
Redundancy. One backup is not enough. There must be an on-site backup (so that restores are really fast) as well as an off-site backup (in case the whole place burns to the ground). They should be identical in configuration and operation, and the off-site should communicate over an encrypted channel.

The result is my 'simple backup' solution.

Simple Backup
0.8 06mar11

The core of this backup system is a shell script that uses rsync and hard links to do incremental backups. The package also includes a crontab to run it regularly, logrotate script to manage the log files, and logwatch bits to do daily reporting using the logwatch system.

On the server, simply unpack the tarball then modify the targets file. Run the backup manually, or add a crontab to do it every hour, day, and/or month.

On the client, sshd and rsync must be installed. To enable backups simply install the public ssl certificate for the backup user onto the client.

readme

simple-backup-0.8.tgz