Introduction

Backup and recovery is essential. Failure to have verified backup and recovery procedures puts your data at risk of loss. Users often only learn this lesson after critical information they require is permanently lost. Attempting to recover from data loss can be both time consuming and extremely difficult. So learn from others mistakes, and ensure beforehand that you have a system in place that protects your data and suits your needs.

Before deciding on a backup and recovery strategy you have to ask the following questions:

Backup

Types of Backup

There are many methods to provide backup and recovery; choosing the best process for you or your business will have to take several factors in to account.

example: if you can withstand losing one week of data then a weekly backup would be sufficient, but if you can only withstand losing one day then you would need to employ a nightly backup (or a variation)

This document will cover three basic types of backup; Full, Incremental, and Differential.

Full: A full backup backs up all the files in the back up target.

Incremental: An incremental backup backs up all the files that have changed since the last backup.

Differential: A differential backup backs up all the files that have changed since the last full backup.

Backup Methods

Depending on your budget and specific RTO and RPO you can choose from manual, local automated, or remote automated.

mtime, atime and ctime

Ubuntu records three different times for each file:

Recovery

note: many people consider only the backup part of this process and do nothing to verify that the backup can be restored. It is very important to test that your backup process is working and that data can be recovered.

It is crucial that your backups are tested by restoring them. Here are some tests you should do to ensure that you can recover from a disaster:

If you do not test you may find out that nothing was being backed up when you need to restore the files in reality.

Backup Utilities

wiki documented utilities

Utility

Interface

Raw / File

Supports

Remote

Incremental

Differential

Automation

Déjà Dup

Graphical (Duplicity frontend)

FILE

YES

YES

NO

YES

grsync

Graphical

FILE

YES

YES

?

via Cron

pybackpack

Graphical

FILE

YES

YES

?

NO

TAR

Command line

FILE

YES

YES

?

via Cron

rsync

Command line

FILE

YES

YES

?

via Cron

dump

Command line

RAW

YES

YES

?

via Cron

Duplicity

Command line

FILE

YES

YES

NO

via Cron

BackupPC

Command line

FILE

YES

YES

?

via Cron

Bacula 1 2

Both

FILE

YES

YES

?

YES

Mondo Rescue

Command line

FILE

YES

YES

?

YES

SimpleBackupSuite

Graphical

FILE

YES

YES

?

YES

backup-manager

Command line

FILE

YES

YES

?

via Cron

Alternatives

You might also want to check out these backup programs which will help you to make automated backups of your system:

Discussions and Suggestions

In addition to that already discussed, there are projects still in development that you may wish to keep appraised of or even participate in.


CategoryBackupRecovery CategoryCommandLine

BackupYourSystem (last edited 2024-01-18 13:08:08 by kobicat)