[clug] Story: Fijian Resort complex loses a single disk: business process stops for 1-2 days

[Alex Satrapa]

On 25 Jul 2014, at 23:18 , Hal Ashburner <hal at ashburner.info> wrote:

> Does anyone follow anything like the jwz prescription? http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html

Time Machine does basically the same thing as jwz’s recipe, though it adds hourly backups in separate directory trees (…/Backups.backupdb/Host Name/datetime/«remainder of path»), and includes a convenient interface for recovering files from backups too.

An rsync recipe is here: http://blog.interlinked.org/tutorials/rsync_time_machine.html

So use the command:
  sudo rsync -vaxAX --delete --ignore-errors —link-dest=/Volumes/Backup/current / /Volumes/Backup/$date

or to modify the “rsync time machine” script:

> #!/bin/sh
> date=`date "+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S"`
> rsync -vaxzAXP --link-dest=PATHTOBACKUP/current $SOURCE $HOST:PATHTOBACKUP/back-$date
> ssh $HOST "rm -f PATHTOBACKUP/current && ln -s back-$date PATHTOBACKUP/current"


Remember to use -H if you are in the habit of hard-linking large files to save space.

And remember to actually rotate your on-site and off-site backups on a more frequent basis than once a month. Once a week is a great start :)

Alex