Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Help Needed to setup 'rdiff-backup' on SuSE !

[Greg Freemyer]

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 7:33 AM, neomatrix
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I need a help to setup 'rdiff-backup' on SLES server, and i require below.
>
> (I) Backup will be  compressed in the backup server


rdiff-backup keeps a normal uncompressed copy of every file.
Compression is only used for maintaining the history of the file
changes.

So you need to put your backup destination on a compressing
filesystem.  I've never tried that with linux and have no
recommendations.

> (II) Backup must retain the the attributes as original.

Metadata is maintained by default.

> (III) Backups will always create a new file rather than overwriting it

rdiff-backup sends a rsync like set of deltas from the source computer
to the backup computer.  The previous backup is then used to create a
new backup by applying those deltas.  And a reverse delta is created
and maintained that allows the current backup to be reverted to
historical versions.  I'm not sure if that satisfies your desire or
not.

I don't think you have any control of the process.

I keep a local rdiff-backup of my files and a remote copy.  I rsync
the local copy to the remote.  rsync has lots of options for how that
is done.  If you want details, I can give you my command line for
that.

> (IV) incremental backup daily.

You get a increment every time you call rdiff-backup.  So use cron to
invoke it daily.  If there are no changes between calls, then your
backup won't be modified.

note: I have a nightly backup script which invokes rdiff-backup.  It
does several other things, so it is my backup script I call from cron,
not rdiff-backup directly.

note2: There are some scripts running around that read rdiff-backup
logs and statistics and email you a nightly summary.  I do that for
each of my machines I backup.

>
> If you have some doc or a pointer it would be great.
>
> Please help me out.
>
> Regards,
> Neo
>
Greg