Re: Setup for Lin rsnap serving 4 winxp boxes

On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 11:54:15PM -0500, reader@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> But cutting to the chase, I need somekind of backup server for 3 WinXP
> boxes that are mostly devoted to video and graphic editing of various
> kinds.  These will be large files but also many normal sized files as
> well.
> 
> I've spent this week testing different Windows backup solutions and
> none seemed to offer the networking flexability and what might be
> called auto versioning of rsnapshot/rsync.

I believe that rdiff-backup and boxbackup would fit the bill.

> The one thing I noticed that seemed more built in was that some kind
> of compression can be toggled as part of most windows backup schemes.

Most video and image files won't compress well anyway.

> A few things come to mind like if using Reiserfs or ext3 for backup
> destination has problems.  Remembering that the winxp machines will
> need to browse the backups and versions often to retrieve past work or
> whatever.

That's fine, you can export any Linux filesystem, regardless of format,
using Samba.

> I wondered if maybe the backup disk should be ntfs to avoid some file
> system related problems but that introduces big problems for hardlinks
> and symlinks I think.

Yes, it would mean no hardlinks.  But it wouldn't help with backing up
the NTFS-specific file metadata, as rsync itself doesn't know about that
so can't copy it.

>                                                 I can script that of
> course with a wrapper but wondered if rsnapshot has builtin provision
> for running programs before or after backup is run.

See the cmd_preexec and cmd_postexec options.

-- 
David Cantrell | Hero of the Information Age

Today's previously unreported paraphilia is tomorrow's Internet sensation

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