Backup one server to another

[tucansam]

Guys,

 

I am having some interesting problems.  I am using this script:

 

https://github.com/laurent22/rsync-time-backup

 

to back up select shares from my primary server to a backup server.  Its been going well for over a year, however I confess that, even after reading the page referenced above, I don't know 100% how the damn things works.  I thought it was doing incremental backups, but examining files in each of the created directories (each invocation of the script generates a unique directory based on date and time), shows nearly complete lists of all files from all shares.  I think many of them are technically symlinks.

 

I have found problems using either Unbalance, or Windows Explorer, to move files.  If I select a directory that should contain a small number of files, and right-click-properties in Windows explorer, it spends many minutes counting many tens of thousands of files.  If I try Unbalance, I either get errors that there is not enough free space to move files (there is), or, once I fixed that, Unbalance now tells me there are 876534 hours left to move the files, and that number only increased over time.

 

So my first question is: is anyone else using the above mentioned script, or have you used it in the past?

 

My second question is: does anyone have any recommendations for a method to periodically back up one server to another?  I tried looking at various dockers and apps, generally involving cloud backup of some kind, hoping I could adapt it to server-to-server use, to no avail.  I want to help protect against bit rot by maintaining several full copies of important data, and then creating new backups of only changed files.  This will help save space, but also if I discover a family picture is now corrupt, I can go back to several dates' worth of backups and find a version that is corruption free.

 

If anyone has any other general suggestions, I'm all ears.

 

[tr0910]

I just downloaded and tested it.  It seems to behave somewhat like rsnapshot.  So yes, the 2nd and 3rd backups and on are really only symlinks.  This means that as long as you are only modifying a few small files between backups, you get the benefit of a complete versioned backup with only a tiny bit of additional disk space being used for the versioning.

 

I would not use this for backing up a complete server, but for backing up documents or source code that has significant potential for revisions, and you would like to keep a copy of all the revisions just in case.  Straight rsync copy is more relevant for backing up media files that never change.  For simple backups without versioning, I use the following...

rsync -avu /from/some/source /to/some/dest

I haven't tested your linked rsync_time_backup extensively yet so can't really comment further on it.  Perhaps your problems are related to scale.  Did you test with a small 1-3gb folder first and see how it behaves?

Edited February 13, 2019 by tr0910