rsback software allows you to backup file trees in rotating archives.
rsback makes rotating backups using the common rsync program and some standard file utilities on Unix-based backup hosts. Its purpose is to mirror certain file trees from a remote host or from the local system and to store them as rotating archives in backup repositories on the local backup host. The file structure, permissions, ownerships and time stamps of the mirrored data are the same as in the original sources.
rsback is a kind of front end to rsync written in Perl which allows a system administrator to configure and execute backups of different file trees located on remote hosts or on the local system (e.g tasks for hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, … backups).
If rsback is executed at regular intervals (preferably scheduled by cron jobs), it maintains rotating backup archives. To restore files from the backup repository no special restore procedure is necessary. To recover files or directories, you just copy them from the archive tree back to the original location or wherever you want to place them.
The combination of rsync’s powerful capabilities and the extensive use of hard links for copying archives within the local file system results in a fast and disk space saving backup technique.
Usagesback-0.6.2.pl [-OPTIONS [-MORE_OPTIONS]] [--] [PROGRAM_ARG1 ...]
The following single-character options are accepted:
With arguments: -c
Boolean (without arguments): -h -v -i -d
Options may be merged together. — stops processing of options.
Space is not required between options and their arguments.
What’s New in This Release:
· New parameter update =
Background:
To get consistent backups of live systems (data bases, virtual machines, …) these have to be shutdown before. To speedup backups of such systems, this procedure may help in some cases:
Step 1: Run a backup task of the running system (live-backup). Use ‘ignore_rsync_errors = 24′ (vanished source files).
Step 2: Shutdown the system.
Step 3: Run a task with ‘update = live-backup’ to take an update snapshot of the backup from Step 2.
Step 4: Restart the system.
The downtime (during step 3) should be considerably shorter compared to step 1 because only those files which have changed in the meantime have to be transfered.
· Warnings are now written to STDOUT, too. This may be helpful if rsback is lauched by cron jobs with commands like rsback -vc /etc/rsback-mywork.config >> /var/log/rsback/mywork.log. In this case, usually the owner of the job will be informed by mail if something went wrong (was written to STDERR). But errors have not been written to the log file (STDOUT) which made debugging often difficult. This can now be changed with warnings_to_stdout = yes
· Re-sorted CANGELOG. last entry first now.