Talk:Personal Backup

Slefevre,

I've been using DeltaCopy (a Windows-based CYGWIN shell that supports Rsync over an SSH connection) to back up personal files to my personal backups user, using SSH keys as outlined in the DeltaCopy article.

Your latest edit indicates that SSH keys don't work. If you have other/better/more specific information I'd like to know (e.g. it doesn't work for every user on every server, etc.), but SSH keys are working fine for me.

Also, your edits removed the only reference in the article to DeltaCopy. Why not list ALL of the possible programs that can be used, instead of making users click on the link to Rsync backups and then, from there, DeltaCopy? My educated guess is that the majority of DH users are running Windows and have no idea how to run CYGWIN.

Your thoughts?

--quena 17:59, 1 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Slefevre,


 * Not having heard from you, I'll assume it's OK to revert your changes. I have been using DeltaCopy for two weeks, so I'm quite sure that SSH keys are allowed. I'd be happy to revisit this with you if I've overlooked something, or if I don't have the full picture.


 * --quena 22:30, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

quena, I've made a small tweak to some of the pages so that windows users have a link to cwrsync which nicely packages only what is required to run rsync and ssh so it's very easy to use.

Julian Knight 27 April 2009

I intend to remove any reference to rdiff-backup and any other scripts and commands need a shell. Rdiff-backup needs to be running on the Dreamhost server, and currently isn't (and you can't run a shell to start it anyway). I'll wait a week or two for any objections.

We really could do with some some practical personal backup scripts that are push, not pull, oriented. My current plan is to use sshfs (for Unix-like operating systems) to mount the Dreamhost backup directory on my home pc, and see if rdiff-backup works. If so, I'll post back (but it won't help Windows users, of course).

NickC 09:47, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Backups of the backup
I want to document the clarification of the backups of backups issue. I received this email from DreamHost:

From: DreamHost Customer Support Team  Subject: Re: [pstudier 43666405] Backups of Personal Backup data Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2011 19:14:43 -0700 (PDT)

While redundant backups are not set in place of your backup data (since it's a backup server...), the hard drives are in RAID so that data can be reconstructed in case of drive failure. Because no backup systems are 100% reliable (what if three drives failed at the same time? It COULD happen...), I again must stress the importance of keeping your own backups, and not relying solely on any external backup sources.

Thanks! Brian A

How to efficiently back up multiple incremental snapshots (?)
I've read the explanation of how to duplicate rm and mv in order to combine rsync with sftp for creating incremental snapshots, and --link-dest is indeed great, but wouldn't it all be easier by just running two rsync calls, as such:

rsync -Pavye ssh --delete-after ~/mybu/ bu:~/bu_cur/ rsync -Pavye ssh --link-dest=../bu_cur/ ~/mybu/ bu:~/bu_`date "+%Y%m%d-%H%M%S"`/

?

(bu is an .ssh/config host+hostname+user entry)

In essence, updating the same 'current' snapshot, and then "copying" it to a timestamped snapshot with a second rsync call. The second rsync call will be almost instantaneous, as no actual data is transmitted. (every file in ~/mybu/ is identical to its copy in bu:~/bu_cur/, as we've just synced them). I've tested it a bit (locally, but there should be no difference using ssh authentication) and it seems to work, but I might be missing something, as I'm pretty new to this. Your input is appriciated. Thanks. Foo 02:36, 5 June 2011 (PDT)