Squawks of the Parrot

Try out Mondo Rescue. It lets you backup to a CD set. It lets you do selective restore, and the CD set is bootable Linux based on the currently running kernel.

I know this doesn't answer your question, but an easier solution than CD-Rs might be cheap IDE hard drives. For around $100 you can get a 120-160GB drive. That's like 75cents per GB: about three times as expensive as CD-Rs, but a heck of a lot less annoying to maintain. Compress your backups and you could probably fit a full backup and quite a few incrementals on a single drive.

A quick survey of various commercial linux backup packages makes it look like incremental backups to hard drives are reasonably common.

i have a NAS that i use for backups. just plug it into the network, mount it with nfs or samba, and do a nightly rsync to it. mine is a Tritton T-NAS 120, but you can get bigger ones now for a pretty reasonable price. eg, do a search for the Guslink 250GB NAS.

IME, any kind of backup solution that involves manual intervention (switching CDRs, etc) won't work for me at home because i'm lazy and i won't do it as often as i should. backups have to be fully automated.

I've found a good solution is a second hard drive doing nightly rsync backups, using the --backup option to maintain archives of deleted/changed files. The scripting can be a bit of a nightmare, so I've written a small Python program to automate it (and the removal of old archives).

Having nightly snapshots of one month's worth of files with no manual intervention is worth the cost of the HD. I'd recommend CDR backup as well, but shy of lightening/fire/theft the 2nd HD works well for every day backup.

There is a cool tip in Linux Server Hacks on how to closely emulate snapshot backups using just rsync and cp -al. You only ever do incremental backups, but each appears like a full backup, and you have direct access to all the stuff as is, inside the filesystem. I'd imagine doing that against some sort of NAS or external HDD or something would be as good as you need it and then some.

I'll dig out the details if you don't have the book.

While I could use an external hard disk for the backups, I really don't want to--I'd much prefer removable media that I can store offline, have multiple copies of, and generally treat like tapes. (Well, OK, other than their pathetic lifetimes relative to tapes, but...)

I'll take a look into Mondo and see how it goes.

Here's the rsync incremental backup method someone has already alluded to:

http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

There's also tar --newer, which when slapped together with ssh and compression is quite servicable.

Odd that no one mentioned http://www.partimage.org/. Partimage can autosplit images for backup to CDR, create a bootable restore cd, backup across the network, etc. No incremental backups though...

You may also want to check out http://www.linux-backup.net. -Put your sunglasses on first, as the color scheme of the site is hard on the eyes.

Check out dirvish. It does snapshot-like backups to disk, but then you can make CD-Rs of that.

Argh, I've recently been bitten by IDE backup. My disk was overwritten by Win2k (which I forced to write to a 160GB partition when it only supports 128GB -- serves me right) and my backup script turned out didn't backup my important folders (serves me right for not testing). I've sworn from then on to keep a CD backup. IDE is just too volatile. A small mistake and poof, there goes all your data.

For incremental backup, I recommend rdiff-backup. Then you can tar the whole thing (or just the rdiff-backup-data/ subdir, which contains the increments). You can use tar -M (multivolume) and set -L (tape length) to 700MB.

rdiff-backup is much nicer than rsync, which sucks RAM for large tree.

Is there a reason it must be CD-R? DVD-RW drives and media have come down in price considerably. Given that they can store about 6x the data, they would be a LOT less hassle.

The big reason for CD-R is that's what's on the server at the moment. There wasn't really any reason for anything fancier at the time, and I'm not sure there's really any justification to going up to a writable DVD drive for this.

Did you end up picking a tool? I'm in the same position right now and trying to figure something out.

I have access to a DVD burner though. I would prefer it was supported.

Try this , this is an easy way to make a full backup into cd's

http://www.linuxorbit.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=222

But i like using a second hard drive ready to boot, that makes rsynced backups every night.

Another good solution would be raid mirroring disk.

Hard drives are not good for backups. They are prone to mechanical and electrical problems, shock, etc... plus it's easy to fat-finger something and wipe out both your backup and your source files in one or two commands.

DVD+RW is a good choice because the media is cheap, highly reusable. It fits nicely in a safety deposit box (most are wide enough to accommodate CDs and DVDs in sleeves, not jewel cases).

Sure, removable media is subject to damage in handling but generally speaking you will have more than one backup on removable media. So if one backup set is fouled up, you will at least have another, if not several.

Look at 'dar' for backing up to either CD or DVD+RW.