Posted on Sat 27 September 2014

Backups Simplified

I spent quite a bit of time today looking at different options for making sure my laptop was all backed up. Starting with rdiff-backup - which seems great if you are doing local backups and have LVM setup -, remembering I had been using rsnapshot previously and then wondering how to configure it for targets that are only available sometimes: push backups.

That was when it hit me: I already have all my data in Dropbox. Including most of my dotfiles, I just symlink them out of my Dropbox folder into the appropiate location, making it easy to keep my configuration in sync across all my machines.

The same process makes it much easier to keep my laptop backed up: I just run Dropbox on my backup server, then do a local backup of it every hour. Thus Dropbox takes care of all the hard syncing and I still get hourly backups whenever possible. This of course works exactly the same with Google Drive or other syncing clients, but for legacy reasons I already have all my data in Dropbox. (I do have my most recent backup directory symlinked into Google Drive, essentially a poor mans offsite backup.)

What's the benefit over just using Dropbox alone? Using rsnapshot you get easy access to old versions of your Dropbox folder, and you probably need it anyway to keep your other servers backed up.

Tags: linux, backup

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