Extra features include -
1. Bandwidth scheduler, WAN optimizations
2. SSL secure, snapshot supports and all
3. Good compression

The company has tall claims on the blog - blog.druvaa.com/2008/03/2…

They seem to be building single instancing around backup, which can speed up backup speed to 4x and storage cost to reduce by same amount.

Its downloadable for Windows and available for Linux on demand. I have requested and waiting for MAC release which someone from support promised in April End.

If you are a "good" Ubuntu/Debian sysadmin who effectively leverages the package manager rather than hacking around it, you get rewarded when it comes to backups…

On my system, of the 16GB / partition I back up a 4KB text file (package list), a 500MB local APT repo, and /etc and a few data files in /var. Everything else can be reconstituted from a quick cp and a single apt command. This makes backing up the "entire system" a lot easier

On the assumption that you do, you very probably should use LVM and encrypted partitions on the media.

Of course if you are using LVM on your laptop or the computer that you are backing up, you may want to use lvm snapshots to do the backup in the first place. This doesn’t give you the backup history that the provided rsync, or rdiff solutions provide, but may provide you with faster initial ‘full backup’ starting points for the rsync solutions.

As opposed to backing up the entire hard disk though, I would recommend snapshots of directory trees that have variable and configuration information you will need (/etc, and many of the /var directories such as /var/www, and /var/mysql if you are running a web server) Also use the appropriate apt tools to collect a list of the installed applications for your system, possibly even using aptoncd or the like if you suspect that when you need to recover you may not have access to the internet.

That should leave the user directory tree as the primary tree that needs to be backed up.

For some media servers you may also want to back up folders used to capture media to, however that will depend upon your own archival requirements. If you had transferred all the Disney tapes to the media server for your 4 year old, who’s now 8, and far more interested in Anime, you might not find the Disney content to be all that necessary to maintain. But you might want to continue maintaining that copy of Casablanca you recorded off of TCM. Then again, they will probably show it again right?

I’ve also had other backup options leave me in the lurch, which is why I was using tar archives until this week, and why I chose to try rsync instead of the other options. I’m glad I’m not the only one thinking this way. That encourages me a bit.

I especially appreciate your comment #3 as I found myself wondering earlier today whether this would work.

(1) look at -x to rsync, which excludes any mounted filesystems on top of the backup tree. It’s really nasty to accidentally have GNOME VFS, SSHFS, or something else mounted while backing up and before you know it you’ve backed up the universe.

(2) I personally prefer rsync to rdiff-backup and rsnapshot and friends because it’s really robust and reliable in all my experience, while I’ve had the other utilities flake on me before to the point of needing a rebuild. And that’s totally unacceptable in a backup solution… You might also want to think about combining rsync with LVM snapshotting to implement incremental or differential backups.

(3) This kind of procedure can also be easily used to clone a system to another. For the most part Linux doesn’t care what hardware it’s running on… I’ve not installed Ubuntu from a CD for 2 years now. I’ve got my cloning images of Ubuntu just the way I like it, and every time I need to load up another system or VM I just unpack one of those images.

Maybe I need to find a better word to express, "It only saves the stuff that has changed since the last backup," even though it doesn’t save both the old and new versions, etc. If that was what I needed, then rdiff-backup would be better, or subversion, or git, etc.

matt