Open source file backup tool for linux

Solution 1:

You need to be more specific about what you are trying to backup: recommendations may differ if you are backing up the contents of a database server, file server, desktop machine, and so forth. Also, how automated you want your backups to be (and conversely how much you might want to interact with the process) is also significant.

For the vast majority of my online backups I use rsync to produce a snapshot based backup, similar to the method described in this old-but-still-relevant document. If you prefer not to script this sort of thing up yourself, there is rsnapshot which is based on that article and rdiff-backup which uses similar techniques.

For offline backups I occasionally manually run the same sort of process to external drives that are temporarily plugged into an appropriate machine for the purpose. Often this is done on the backup server, as those are more more physically local to me, and is taking a backup of the most recent backups to save time and bandwidth.

Occasionally I run a full compare of the latest file server backups with the active filesystems (by running cd /location; find . -type f | sort | xargs sha1sum > /tmp/sums 2>&1 on both live and backup machines and comparing the resulting files, I've not automated this yet though I really should get around to that) and restore the mail+calendar+colab server backups to a clone of that server running in a VM. Remember: a backup solution can not be relied upon unless it is regularly tested. You don't want to find the backups haven't been working at the point where you need to restore from backup!