On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 12:06 PM, Philip Prindeville
<philipp_subx AT redfish-solutions DOT com> wrote:
>
>
> The drive is a WD 3 TB USB 3.0 drive formatted as ext4 in a single partition 
> (sdc1) and it is mounted (via /etc/fstab) at boot time.  It isn’t intended 
> for any other purpose but backups.
>
> I’d like to do regular backups, with the capability of either a bare metal 
> restore of a machine (assuming a boot from a recovery ISO image or else an 
> alternate /boot partition on the host), as well as backing up some high churn 
> server state (like /var/svn on an SCM server, or /home for various CI 
> [continuous integration] users I’ve set up).


You have a lot of special cases here.  Aside from the glaring problem
that a single failure of several types (hardware/admin/software) could
wipe all your copies at once, backuppc won't be great at most of those
cases.   In particular, it doesn't do bare metal by itself and it
won't do the atomic updates that your svn transactions expect.

> I’d like to do full backups at least twice a week, and hourly incrementals.

Maybe... There's quite a bit of overhead even for incrementals as it
has to walk all the directories to rebuild the directory tree and copy
changes - and even an rsync copy is expensive when you have large
changed files.   Once or twice daily is more realistic.

> Are you suggesting I use amanda, or a cron/dump script instead?

Those won't be a lot better.  Clonezilla or ReaR would handle your
special-case of bare-metal restores. Subversion's own svnsync or
hotcopy would handle a subversion repository correctly.   But, you
would be much safer with a 2nd system doing the backups over the
network.

>>
>> Are you looking for something like Apple's Time Machine?
>
>
> My understanding was that Time Machine was more oriented towards user data 
> backups, and not a server scenario with a large amount of data which churns 
> frequently.

Files are files...  But some things need special handling.  Time
machine has a 'bare metal' advantage in that any new install of OSX
already knows how to restore from it.  Backuppc gives you an
approximate equivalent of a tar image but you need a working
installation to read it.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
      lesmikesell AT gmail DOT com

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