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New Backup Strategy?

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

I've been doing a lot of research recently to determine the best way to improve my current backup scheme, which consists of Mozy for online backups and Apple's Time Machine for local backups. I've documented my Mozy issues in a different post, so I will briefly comment on my problems with TimeMachine: It's slow, resource intensive, and unreliable; and its slow! I'm currently backing up to a USB drive connected as an AirDisk with my Apple Airport Express Basestation. Its very convenient (always available and not having to consistently run my home server), but slow - not just over 802.11g, but also when connected via gigabit ethernet. However, my bigger problem lies with Time Machine (not AirDisk), although both could be a lot faster. Did I mention Time Machine was slow? Anyway, here are the backup apps I'm looking at:

  • rsync 3.0.1: The gold standard - delta encoding, perfect Mac OS meta-data support, SSH-remote transfer; browsable files on a system; excellent Mac meta-data support (Cons: no versioning; no built-in encryption or compression???)
  • rsnapshot: Configuation front-end to rsync; makes versioned incremental backups using hardlinks; browsable. (Cons: no encryption)
  • rdiff-backup: Incremental; versioned; SSH; Uses libsync delta encoding; increments stored as diffs; (Cons: no encryption; increments stored in proprietary diffs - not browsable & requires rdiff-backup for restore; bad Mac meta-data support)
  • duplicity: Uses libsync, incremental, encrypted (GPG), and compressed (tar); increments saved as diffs (like rdiff-backup); Amazon S3 support (Cons: encrypted and tar'ed on server - not browsable and requires duplicity to restore; No versioning!)
  • Box Backup: Continuous data protection; requires complex daemon setup?; file-system server
One problem I have is with restoration: I'm not a CLI guru, and would like to have to use it as little as possible. Therefore, backup programs that save files as a regular filesystem directory that can be browsed/restored with GUI tools (instead of the app itself) are preferential (not sure how easy restoring from an rdiff-backup diff file would be without using the app to combine the files.)

Now, all I have to do is find a good online storage/hosting provider that doesn't charge too much, but that will be saved for another post.

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