storeBackup - A Gem of a Backup Solution

[wjw]

I was recently in a position where I needed a backup solution that was flexible enough to handle my laptop as well as my home server. I back up to a couple of older USB drives; A 1.5T for my laptop, and a 750G for my home server. The plethora of options out there is daunting, and the most obvious like rsync (which I really like and use often) are very nice. But I wanted something that I could set up quickly and would meet a couple of other needs easily.

• I wanted it to conform to a standard backup scheme where there are a couple backups each day, a daily backup for a week or so, a monthly backup, and a yearly.
• I wanted it to delete outdated backups
• I wanted it to be tolerant of the backup drive not being available, such as when I am out of town with my laptop, but don't have the USB drive to back up to.
• and ... I also wanted it to do something like rsync in that it stores only the differences, not an entire copy of everything in each backup.

What I found was a Perl application called storeBackup. It has been around for a while, claims to be production ready/stable, and it seems to me as if it is.

I did a non-exhaustive search here on perlmonks and did not find a reference to this handy tool, so thought I would mention it here in meditations....as I was sitting here meditating about it. The darn thing works really well! It does exactly what I want it to do in that it meets all the requirements listed above, and has the added benefit that it is written in Perl.

For anyone looking for a very sweet backup solution that is simple to set up, is tolerant of a dynamic environment, and provides efficient, accessible, and easily recoverable backup data, I would certainly recommend looking at this solution. From my perspective, it just plain rocks!

[kevbot]

Hi wjw,

Thanks for the link to storeBackup (I had never heard of it).

I use BackupPC. I run BackupPC on a linux box on my network, and backup my Mac laptop with it. It has some of the features you mention, and it also happens to be implemented in Perl. Basically, it is a wrapper around ssh and rsync, with a web interface for configuration.