| Aardback is a daily (or however-oftenly) backup system that consists of two scripts. I run it daily, but it'd work if run more- or less-often than that. It creates a full snapshot of the system being backed up on first run, then it makes an archive copy of that snapshot on subsequent runs. The archive cosists of hardlinks back into the main snapshot, so the end result is a snapshot that takes up almost no space except for the size of changed files.
For example, I currently have 5 machines and 51 days of archives for those machines at work. Those 5 machines use 38 GB of disk space, and with the 51 days of archived backups, only use 83 GB of disk. A big part of that changed data is user mailspools and logfiles - those things change every day, so they're copied each day. There'll be a utility to walk the archive finding space wasters shortly.
This scheme is really convenient, because it allows you to keep a full filesystem snapshot for an arbitrary length of time, making it really easy to find and restore individual files or full directories as of a specific date. If you wanna restore someone's home directory as of 3 weeks ago, just find the archive folder from 3 weeks ago and copy the files out. That's it.
|
Products of Aardvarks With Chisels : 
Backup System