How The Backup Process Has Changed [LWN.net]

How The Backup Process Has Changed

Posted Nov 29, 2007 7:14 UTC (Thu) by chema (subscriber, #32636)
In reply to: How The Backup Process Has Changed by paulmfoster
Parent article: How The Backup Process Has Changed

Both dump and tar can do incremental backup.
You can control the incremental backup in dump with the backup level. 

And in tar case, you can use the '--after-date DATE', '--newer DATE' options which will make
tar to only store files newer than DATE. Moreover, you can combine find with tar to get a
"more selected" backup. 

BTW I'm quite surprised noone has mentioned Bacula or Amanda.

-- 
Chema

(Log in to post comments)

How The Backup Process Has Changed

Posted Nov 29, 2007 19:03 UTC (Thu) by vmole (subscriber, #111) [Link]

Well then, let me promote Bacula (http://www.bacula.org/). It's overkill for backing up a single PC to a spare disk, but once you get more than a few clients, having eveything organized in one spot is much nicer than dealing with a bunch of ad-hoc rsync scripts. Bacula supports a wide variety of tapes, tape changers, and disk-based volumes, and DVDs. You can schedule full backups, differential, and incremental. You can run scripts on the clients before and after backups (to e.g. dump databases, stop and start processes, etc.) Supports Windoze, OSX, and most unix-like OSes as clients; while you can build (or download) the server for Windows, it's not the main development platform.

I used it at work, backing up a wide variety of systems, and use it at home. Very satisfied.

dump incremental backups

Posted Dec 1, 2007 9:10 UTC (Sat) by mennucc1 (subscriber, #14730) [Link]

The way 'dump' does incremental backups is superior to what can be achieved by simply using 
  tar '--after-date DATE', '--newer DATE'


Dump indeed stores also the state of directories, so that incremental backups will keep record
of which files were deleted.