Four programs for doing single-host-pair disk to disk backups

This software is owned by The university of California, Irvine - not any version of the GPL. GPL is a fine series of licenses, but the owners of the software need it to be distributed under these terms.

Table of contents:

What the programs have in common
Backup.local
Backup.remote
Backup.rsync
Backup.SRB

What these four programs have in common:

They're all bash scripts.
They're all intended for single-host-pair, disk to disk backups.
They're all intended to be run from cron.
They all do their thing as often as you schedule them from cron, including rotations

Here's how they're different:

	First fullsave disk capacity efficiency	First fullsave network efficiency	First fullsave disk speed efficiency	First fullsave CPU efficiency	Subsequent disk capacity efficiency	Subsequent network efficiency	Subsequent disk speed efficiency	Subsequent CPU efficiency	Progress report
Backup.local	Good	No network load at all, unless using a network filesystem like NFS	Good	Very CPU intensive	Poor - no true incrementals	Poor - no true incremetals	Poor - all files are read	Very CPU intensive	Nice - from reblock
Backup.SRB	Good	Good	About one half to one third as disk bandwidth efficient as Backup.local, Backup.rsync or Backup.remote	Very CPU intensive	Poor - no true incrementals	Poor - no true incrementals	About one half to one third as disk bandwidth efficient as Backup.local, Backup.rsync or Backup.remote	Very CPU intensive	Nice - from reblock
Backup.rsync	About half as space efficient as Backup.local, Backup.SRB and Backup.remote	About half as network efficient as Backup.SRB and Backup.remote	Good	Very CPU efficient	Quite good - essentially all backups look like a fullsave, but only one copy of a given file is stored for a given host.	Very good - only new files and changed regions of modified files are transmitted	Quite good - only changed files are read	Very CPU efficient	So so - from rsync
Backup.remote	Good	Good	Good	Very CPU intensive	Poor - no true incrementals	Poor - no true incrementals	Poor - all files are read	Very CPU intensive	Nice - from reblock

Backup.local

Backup.local backs up data from a spot on a single host, to another spot on the same host - unless you use a network filesystem like NFS or SMB.
It'll by default, give you 2 dailies, 2 weeklies and 2 monthlies - all fullsaves.

Usage is currently like:

seki-strombrg> ~/public_html/Backup.local --help
Usage: /Dcs/seki/strombrg/public_html/Backup.local [--normal|--overwrite|--help]

Normal mode will do a backup with rotation

Overwrite mode will overwrite the last daily backup, without doing any rotation at all.  It's for redoing a backup when a previous
one fails.

Uses my reblock program if you run it on a tty, to give you a running progress report.

Backup.remote

Backup.remote backs up data from one host to another, using ssh
It has no command line options at this time; to customize its behavior, edit the script and modify the variables at the top. In the terminology of Backup.local, it is always in --normal mode.
It'll by default, give you 2 dailies, 2 weeklies and 2 monthlies - all fullsaves.
Uses my reblock program if you run it on a tty, to give you a running progress report.
To make Backup.remote not require an ssh password, you may want to read this document. You may also want to turn on root access via ssh in your system's sshd.conf, although since we're using tar archives you may be better off using a nonprivileged account.

Backup.rsync

Backup.rsync backs up data from one host to another, or from/to the same host, and can use rsh, ssh, native rsync, or just the plain POSIX file API,, among other protocols
It has no command line options at this time; to customize its behavior, edit the script and modify the variables at the top. In the terminology of Backup.local, it is always in --normal mode.
There is no default number of backups to keep
Storage and network I/O are vastly more efficient in this version, because only changed files are transmitted and stored.

Usage is like:

seki-strombrg> ~/bin/Backup.rsync --help
Usage: /Dcs/seki/strombrg/bin/Backup.rsync --srcdir srcdir --dstdir dstdir --num-to-keep num-to-keep --use-compression
--num-to-keep is the number of snapshots to keep

Progress output is generated by rsync itself, not by my reblock program
To make Backup.remote not require an ssh password, you may want to read this document. You may also want to turn on root access via ssh in your system's sshd.conf.

Backup.SRB and Restore.SRB

It'll by default, give you 2 dailies, 2 weeklies and 2 monthlies - all fullsaves.
Backup.SRB and Restore.SRB
Backs up using the SRB protocol from SDSC
Requires mtee and chunkup

Back to Dan's tech tidbits