[Discuss] rsnapshot vs. rdiff-backup

[abreauj at gmail.com (John Abreau)]

I've never liked the way rsnapshot handles the additional levels of
snapshots. As I recall, the most recent weekly was several weeks old, the
most recent monthly  was always several months old, etc.

Also, when I used rsnapshot to back up dozens of servers, I found that if
only one portion of one server's backups failed, it would roll back
everything, and I'd lose backups for all servers.

I ended up writing my own wrapper script that ran a separate rsnapshot job
for each server, and I only used rsnapshot for the daily rotation. I wrote
a separate script for weekly, monthly, and yearly rotations that did a "cp
-al" of the daily.0 directory for each server, so the higher-order
snapshots were always a snapshot of the day they were made. The weeklies
were named weekly.0, weekly,1, etc, the monthies were named monthly.Jan,
monthly,Feb, etc, and the yearlies were named yearly.2010, yearly.2011,
etc.

The monthly and yearly snapshots were thought of as archivals, not backups.

I used rsnapshot as an easy way to recover individual files for users.
There was also a separate Amanda backup to tape, in case the rsnapshot ever
failed.


On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 5:02 PM, Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org> wrote:

> On 12/03/2013 03:24 PM, Richard Pieri wrote:
> > Mike Small wrote:
> >> Does btrfs fit in here somewhere? I was using DragonFlyBSD for awhile,
> >
> > Not as such, no. File system and logical volume snapshots are not
> > backups. They're snapshots.
> >
> >
> >> Also, apparently rsync itself has a --link-dest feature which maybe
> >> can be used to accomplish at least some of what rsnapshot does for you,
> >> you know, for the minimalists?
> >
> > rsnapshot rotates replicas so that the <foo>.0 directory is always the
> > most recent replica at that time level (yearly, monthly, weekly,
> > daily, hourly). rsync can't do that without a wrapper -- which is what
> > rsnapshot really is.
> >
> rsnapshot can run on BSD. It uses the rsync --link-dest feature. You
> generally have an hourly.0 directory. When rsnapshot runs it renames
> hourly.n to hourly.n+1 and removes the oldest based on your config. It
> then creates hourly.0, and uses hourly.1 as the target of --link-dest.
> The daily, weekly, monthly and yearly directories are normally created
> by renaming the oldest of the hourly, daily, weekly, monthly. rsnapshot
> is a perl script. While rsnapshot creates snapshorts, it is really a
> backup system because it creates multiple directories.
>
> --
> Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
> Boston Linux and Unix
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>
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John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
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