How The Backup Process Has Changed [LWN.net]

How The Backup Process Has Changed

Posted Nov 29, 2007 8:59 UTC (Thu) by PaulWay (subscriber, #45600)
Parent article: How The Backup Process Has Changed

I'd add a mention of DAR here (http://dar.linux.free.fr).  Designed as a Disk-ARchiver rather
than tape, it incorporates many of the features that one needs when doing backups -
compression, encryption, slicing, backup of SELinux and other extended attributes,
differential and incremental backups, and a suite of file selection methods.  It keeps a
catalogue of the files and their locations, so the disk seeks to the exact file you want
quickly, and the catalogue can be separate for incremental or differential backups relative to
fixed media (e.g. DVDs).  It may be counter to the old Unix philosophy of combining small
tools into a larger solution, but it avoids the deficiencies in interaction between those
parts.

It's dependencies are relatively small, it compiles on all architectures AFAIK and it produces
a dar_static file that can be easily put onto your backup media just in case...

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How The Backup Process Has Changed

Posted Nov 29, 2007 14:54 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

One downside is that unless you configure it with --enable-mode=64, it has 
*enormous* memory requirements (as in `backing up a million files uses 
several Gb of RAM'). With --enable-mode=64 it only needs several hundred 
Mb, which is still rather nasty.

But, well, it works. (I use it too, in conjunction with par2 and a huge 
pile of ugly scripting. The huge pile of ugly scripting appears to be de 
rigeur for Unix backup systems.)