Somebody hiding behind a pseudonym G wrote: > > > Most tutorials suggest not to backup tmp and var etc. I decided to > backup the whole var. >
You were the last person I expected to ask a question on this mailing list after those "expert advises" you gave people on OpenBSD desktop in which you insulted 2 dozen port maintainer claiming that their ports are not up to date. > What do you suggest? I though rsnapshot was ok? > OK for what? The first question is do you really need a backup and what are you trying to backup? None of us can help you to answer that question but we can help you to understand different concepts. In my book there are three different things which people refer to as backup. 1. Journaling 2. Genuine Backup 3. Archiving You can think of Journal as a file system level version control system. HAMMER of DragonFly BSD is the only file system which supports fine-grained journaling via history command which can be very finly tuned. ZFS is another file syste/volume manager which supports journaling via ZFS snapshots. You can read this post of mine https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=144340431520709&w=2 for a very naive comparison of the two. OpenBSD will hopefully one day have HAMMER 2 but in the mean time your only option is sysutils/glastree or you can become an expert on mtree I suppose. You could also by a MAC when Apple finishes their Apple file system. Journals are useful if you are dealing with bunch of users who should be really using a version control systems for whatever they are editing but they are too lazy or too dumb to do so. Now comes a genuine backup. A genuine backup is something which you expect to access on the regular basis with moderate seeking speed. rsynapshot is an example of a rsync Perl wrapper written for a genuine backup. Apple time machine is also just a wrapper around rsync. I would strongly suggest you read the following thread https://www.reddit.com/user/rsyncnet/?sort=hot In particular pay attention to the post which starts as " I have some expertise in this area[1] so I would like to provide some additional information for future readers of this thread - specifically on rsync snapshots, rsnapshot, duplicity, attic and borg. The simplest thing to do is to rsync from one system to another. Very simple, but the problem is it's just a "dumb mirror" - there is no history, no versions in the past (snapshots in time) and every day you do your rsync, you risk clobbering old data that you won't realize you need until tomorrow. " Very informative. The only thing I could add is that the guy is not familiar with HAMMER because otherwise he would notice that we went full circle. rsync paired with HAMMER is no longer "dumb mirror". If the target is HAMMER you can do something like SHELL=/bin/sh PATH=/etc:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin # Order of crontab fields # minute hour mday month wday command 0 7 * * * /usr/local/bin/rsync -aW --inplace --delete /home/predrag rsync://predrag@192.168.3.2:873/ftp and you will have full history. That is how I backup my desktop to my DragonFly file server. Some other backup tools are dump/restore, Bacula (make sure you backup the data base because you will not be able to restore), Amanda, HAMMER mirror stream, ZFS rsnapshot. The last one which I use at work is particularly robust in data center settings. Now that is not the full story of backup. The above is typically related to backup of data. Sometimes one wants to backup server configuration files in order to quickly restore the functionality of the server. OpenBSD way of backing up server configuration files is altroot https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#altroot OpenBSD comes with a wonderful tool called softraid http://man.openbsd.org/softraid.4 which can be used to fully encrypt your laptop but also for RAID 1 installation of OpenBSD. Root on RAID 1 gives you a protection but it is not a backup. Typically I backup such OpenBSD server to an external USB device via altroot. People have noticed that sometimes it is useful to backup /var as well. You can use similar approach with /var which I do. Don't forget to dump your databases before you do /altvar backup. Finally most home users will really need Archiving. Archiving is a technique of "permanently" storing data in the case of unlikly loss of original data. There are many ways to do it. Backup type is time-tested way to do it. You can use sysutils/duplicity to archive your encrypted data to Amazon Glacer. Colin Percival will do that for you using the crypto function scrypt he decovered and this little tool sysutils/tarsnap His prices are reasonable. Other formaly inexpensive methoods of archiving involve burning DVDs and taking them to a remote storage. You can find the following userful sysutils/shunt Anyhow, hopefully the above will give you enough to think about without overburden you with concepts like incremental, differential, and full backup. > ps. On linux i was using backintime (which uses rsync) but it seems its > no longer on the packages. > Probably because OpenBSD crew has very aggressive approach in removing obsolite, poorly written, unstable, and poor security track record software from its ports three. You really think that we are incapable of porting tripwire to OpenBSD? Think again! Now you can see who actually have obsolite and older version of the software. It is Linux and I am not talking about Red Hat. I am talking about Ubuntu. Best, Predrag > On 06/13/17 19:05, Paolo Aglialoro wrote: > > +1 > > > > Have a full snapshot of your system, otherwise restore will be a > nightmare. > > Do it with another tool, rsnapshot is mostly useful for data. > > > > Il 13 giu 2017 11:05 AM, "Mark Carroll" <m...@ixod.org> ha scritto: > > > >> On 13 Jun 2017, G. wrote: > >> > >>> Hello! > >>> Im trying to take daily and weekly backups of my system rsnapshot. > >> (snip) > >>> Im not sure if there is anything in var that i should consider > backup > >>> like sysmerge or syspatch. > >> (snip) > >> > >> I have various stuff across different machines that is worth backing > up > >> in var/ like directories for nsd, unbound, www, etc. It all depends > what > >> you're using your machine for thus what you've put in those. > >> > >> Storage these days is cheap: my usual approach is to back up > everything > >> except stuff that I have hunted down via "du" and suchlike as being > >> actually rather large and decided I can certainly live without. > Better > >> to back up a bit too much rather than too little. (Note that things > like > >> logs are rather compressible so even "du" may badly overstate them.) > >> > >> -- Mark > >> > >>
