Skip to main content

Ralsina.Me — Roberto Alsina's website

Geek challenge: Backup this thing!

Here's the sce­nar­i­o:

  • A Lin­ux+Sam­­ba serv­er with 40GB of da­­ta.

  • A SM­B-on­­ly small stor­age serv­er.

Your mis­sion? Back­up the thing. You should do full back­up­s, and keep the last three.

In an­oth­er age, I would have cob­bled a 10-­line script us­ing tar (and split, see be­low) and be done with it. But now I want to use back­up soft­ware.

So, I tried, and I ran in­to the fol­low­ing lim­i­ta­tion­s:

  1. 2GB file­­size lim­it on the stor­age serv­er. Have no idea why, as­­sume can't fix it.

  2. Weird uni­­code char­ac­ters in file­­names. There must be some en­­cod­ing is­­sue, but when a Win­­dows client saves a file with ac­­cen­t­ed char­ac­ter­s, the clients see it all right. On the server, though, they are weird-look­ing. This is enough to make mc un­able to delete some fold­er­s, for ex­am­­ple.

So far I have tried:

  1. rdif­f-back­­up: breaks with the uni­­code chars.

  2. flexback­­up: breaks with file­­size lim­it

  3. rsync: breaks with the uni­­code chars

  4. syn­bax: us­ing rsync back­­end, see above. Us­ing tar back­­end, breaks with file­­size lim­it.

Here's what I wan­t:

A sim­ple back­up soft­ware, where I can tell it "take this, back it there, keep last three back­up­s, do it in files small­er than 2G­B, give me a re­port".

Bonus points if restor­ing it is doable from win­dows.

Any sug­ges­tion­s?

Lucas / 2007-09-14 02:44:

Hi Roberto! I suppose you already discarded Bacula as a solution, can you tell us why?

Roberto Alsina / 2007-09-14 04:41:

Actually, that very server is running bacula already to backup the workstations.

It's just that Baculas seems to me overkill forsuch a simple task.

I mean, I *did* write the script, and it works, and Bacula would need three daemons, a database, and at least 4 configuration files (and not simple ones, either) to do this.


Contents © 2000-2024 Roberto Alsina