[nflug] Centos Backup Best Practices

[Robert Wolfe]

----- Original Message -----
From: Erek Dyskant <erek at blumenthals.com>
To: nflug <nflug at nflug.org>
Sent: Tue, 27 May 2008 21:46:20 -0400
Subject: [nflug] Centos Backup Best Practices


> Howdy All,
> 	I've been using rsnapshot (an rsync-based backup script) for backing up
> CentOS servers, and was very happy with it.  It does efficient backups
> that use native filesystem targets, so it's easy to restore specific
> files, however:
> 	I just ran a full restore dress rehearsal, and found that rsync doesn't
> copy selinux contexts, so I had to disable selinux on the restored
> machine before it would boot.
> 	So, does any of you know of a good backup tool that can do
> network-based incremental backups, and that backs up all of the
> filesystem metadata?  Another requirement is that there need to be tools
> to access specific files or directories (If it doesn't use the native
> target's filesystem like rsnapshot does) from any of the snapshots
> without doing a full restore.

Erek, it sounds like what you need is Amanda (http://amanda.sourceforge.net) which is what we used for network-based backups at LocalNet.  We have one backup server that has an attached SCSI tape device (it will work with disk as well) running the server version of Amanda while all the other machines on our network run the client version of Amanda.