Linux system backup with incremental/snapshots

[PingSpike]

So I've been playing around with linux in virtualbox. Its nice when I screw something up and don't know how to fix it I can just restore a previous snapshot. Is there anyway to get this functionality running bare metal? I guess I don't need state saves exactly but it would be nice if I could grab a quick incremental change backup of the system prior to doing something that might screw everything up.

 

[kommisar]

So I've been playing around with linux in virtualbox. Its nice when I screw something up and don't know how to fix it I can just restore a previous snapshot. Is there anyway to get this functionality running bare metal? I guess I don't need state saves exactly but it would be nice if I could grab a quick incremental change backup of the system prior to doing something that might screw everything up.

You could put a linux distro on a zfs pool. Snapshot the install before you add anything new. Rollback if it breaks. See here for more information: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installing_Arch_Linux_on_ZFS Alternatively, I believe PC-BSD has this functionality with a normal install. See here: http://www.pcbsd.org/

 

[replica9000]

There is also BTRFS and LVM. You could also use rsync too.

 

[jae]

LVM or rSync

 

[Ken g6]

If you're thinking of using rsync, git might be a better alternative.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

If you're thinking of using rsync, git might be a better alternative.

...for the whole system? This is madness!

That said, I'd like to see it work.

You might consider using a low-level hypervisor like Xen, VMWare ESX, or even KVM. Install that on your hardware, then create a VM running Windows. Pass through the funky hardware like the video cards and such directly to the VM, but let the hypervisor handle storage provisioning. That'll give you snapshot capabilities similar to virtualbox, and near-native performance.

 

[Scarpozzi]

Bare metal, you'd have to do it through either a backup agent (using a backup server and software) or do it at the disk or volume level. In both cases, if you're doing anything with Databases, you'd want to likely do a cold backup unless the backup agent has a hot-backup option. Save states are important on time-sensitive stuff.

I really like using snapshots on virtual machines when testing. It allows you to document problems and build a check-list while doing real-time testing.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I have not tried it myself (been wanting to read up more on it and experiment with it) but there is also rdiff-backup.

http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/examples.html

Odd that it's on a site called nongnu though... never noticed that till now.

 

[replica9000]

I've been using rsync for online backups, and dd for offline. I've moved one of my systems to ZFS, so I will be trying out snapshots on that too.