[SOLVED] Rsnapshot for Puppy Linux? Other backup tools?

[increa]

[Update 5/23/2011. Got Rsnapshot running. See http://wiki.increa.com/tiki-index.php?p ... uppy+Linux]

Recently installed Puppy 5.2.5 full install onto my 65 GB hard drive, Dell D620 laptop. I'm a long term Mandriva Linux user, and have always run rsnapshot in the background, doing hourly and daily backups. I also recently purchased a 1TB USB hard drive. Hmm.. mixing the two together, I am wondering..

I cannot find a Puppy package for rsnapshot. Does this exists? Does Puppy tolerate manual installations? But if so, I'll probably have to integrate the development package first, so I can do local compiles. Are there comparative replacements for rsnapshot?

If there is other interest, I'm wondering how many hours would it take to build (and learn how to build) a Puppy package of rsnapshot to distribute to others?

[bigpup]

menu->utility->Pbackup Backup and Sync
This does what you are asking.

[DPUP5520]

here

[increa]

bigpup, DPUP5520,

Thank you for your replies. Here is a tool comparison page I put together about a year ago that gives perspective of what I value in Rsnapshot:

http://www.increa.com/computers/totalco ... ernatives/

My experience is with Unison, Rsnapshot, and Krusader. I see alternatives in the Puppy menu of Pbackup, GAdmin-Rsync, Pmirror. I think only Pbackup and GAdmin-Rsync work in the background on a schedule. Any thoughts on comparing the two? Are these more like Rsnapshot or Unison?

I've played with GAdmin-Rsync for a bit, but I'm running into problems: 1) complaints that the cron daemon isn't running (I keep manually starting it on the command line, but it repeatedly quits on its own, and 2) complaints that a symlink can't be written, and 3) hardlink advantage of Rsnapshot (taking space only for incremental changes) is being lost because my external USB hard drive is formatted for windows.

Do both Pbackup and GAdmin-Rsync do the hardlink incremental paradigm?

[increa]

bigpup,

Played with pbackup today. It does scheduled incremental backups. That's better than nothing, so I've started using it for now.

However, rsnapshot is still my goal because it does something much better. It does incremental backups with hard links that (when no new updates need to be backed up) point back to prior backups.

So the effect is I can browse into any backup directory and see a full backup of the most recent files as the timestamp of THAT directory. No searching through incremental backups to find when a file was last changed. Because any given backup has mostly hard-links, very little space is used to keep the snapshots.

Rsnapshot is very similar to the Mac OSX "time machine" backups. In fact, that may be how Apple implements it.

Oh BTW, yea.. it was a "dirty bit" on my NTFS drive. I let a normal WinXP system talk to it and when removed properly, now Puppy can read/write to it.

[increa]

DPUP5520,

Downloaded your pet file for rsnapshot, appeared to install fine. I'm still lost. Command line "rsnapshot" errors with "Can't locate DirHandle.pm" and all sorts of other garbely goop about what @INC includes. It think it tried to compile or link something.

Command line "rsnapshot -diff" echoes back command line syntax, but won't do anything more.

What I'm looking for (maybe I was sloppy in what I asked for) is the Rsnapshot program that can accept arguments of daily / hourly / monthly / etc and then does incremental backups based on existing files in the backup location, using hard links so that only new changes take up space at the backup location. Sort of like the Mac OSX time-machine capability.

[DPUP5520]

I'll take a look when I get a chance, I didn't compile on a clean machine so maybe a dependency or two is missing.

Edit: seems to require a perl module which is located in /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/DirHandle.pm however I don't remember ever installing any perl modules on my puppy so you may need to install perl if you want rsnapshot to work on your puppy. http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/perl-modules

[increa]

DPUP5520,

Thanks for the Perl lead. I will look more into it. In the mean time, I'm away from my "home computer" and doing much of this from memory. I think getting rsnapshot running, I still have a big hurdle.

When I get rsnapshot running, I am remembering that I still need to

1) create a rather complicated rsnapshot config file
2) create the cron job entires calling rsnapshot with the right hourly, or daily, or monthly parameter on the command line.

When the time comes, would you be willing to send me a copy of your two files, so I can base mine on them. There's no way I can remember to do them from scratch!

Thanks for engaging and helping me get this running.

[increa]

I notice the perl package is from normal Ubuntu. Can I expect that normal Ubuntu packages will work with Puppy?

[DPUP5520]

Yes that package will/should work. Sorry but I don't use rsnapshot I run full drive backups using PING, I only just created that pet when you asked for it and haven't ever used it before aside from testing to make sure it worked.

[increa]

Yes that package will/should work. Sorry but I don't use rsnapshot I run full drive backups using PING, I only just created that pet when you asked for it and haven't ever used it before aside from testing to make sure it worked.

DPUP5520,

I'll read the docs and see if I can generate a ready-to-play pet into the Puppy community.

I get the idea of a pet file being a zip file with built-in md5. How would a package distribute something like crontab inserts without damaging the crontab file a user already has on their computer?

[DPUP5520]

A ".pet" file is actually a tarball, that is, a ".tar.gz" file, except that it has a 32-byte md5sum (file integrity verification code) appended on the end of the file.

http://www.puppylinux.com/development/createpet.htm

If you are having trouble all you gotta do is ask and me or someone else can help you, I have already made a pet including the perl modules into rsnapshot and using your config file.

[increa]

If you are having trouble all you gotta do is ask and me or someone else can help you, I have already made a pet including the perl modules into rsnapshot and using your config file.

Thank you. The config file syntax I put on the internet yesterday is only the lines I *changed* in the file. It would not work for someone to use only those text lines as the entire config file. Because my changes were not Puppy-specific, I thought it would be better for someone to step through the distributed config file and just make the changes one by one as appropriate in their circumstance.

Again thanks!

[DPUP5520]

http://www.mediafire.com/file/19w36t3l7 ... 5.10.1.pet

There is a pet of the perl-modules for you if you wanted it, I probably should have mentioned it earlier but unless you are planning on doing a static build (which I for some reason am never able to do with any of my pets) a "ready to play" pet is usually a bad idea as people may need the dependencies for other things and if they wind up uninstalling the pet they uninstall anything that was installed inside the pet package , in this case the perl-modules, unless you are planning on keeping the pet to yourself or warning others that the modules are also inside the pet and that its not a static build.