[olug] (no subject)

[William E. Kempf]

Prior to my experiences last week I was relying on DrakBackup (the Mandrake supplied backup system) for backing up my Linux box.  Since using it to restore a system, I *seriously* don't like this software.  The idea behind it is that it creates first a "full" backup via tar, then periodically it will do an "incremental" backup via tar to seperate files.  Sounds fine, but at restore time things get ugly.  Here's why.  Imagine this during backup:

full: a, b, c are backed up

incremental: b is backed up (in the real world, b was modified and a was deleted)

Now during restore this occurs:

full: a, b, c are restored

incremental: b is restored

The result is we now have the latest of b and c, but we also now have a, which has technically been deleted.  For me, this meant a LOT of files/directories have been "resurrected from the grave", which at best is a pain in the arse.

So, what I'm looking for is a backup/restore system that meets the following requirements:

* Backs up to a mounted directory (I will use Samba to get the backup to go to my Windows box).

* Performs both full and incremental backups.

* Allows me to restore to any of the "point in time" snapshots with out resurrection of deleted files.

* Does compressed backups.

* Is either free, or cheap.

Any pointers to solutions for this?  If I can't find anything, I might have to resort to rolling my own bash scripts to wrap tar in a manner that suits, but I don't want to have to resort to spending valuable time on this right now.


William E. Kempf
wekempf at cox.net