# Which backup software to choose?



## valsorym (Dec 2, 2011)

Hello all,
Over the past 2 years I have twice lost data from your hard disk. It's a shame! 
I do not want to create a RAID array - a waste of disk space.

Here is the Mac OS is an interesting program Time Machine - it does roll back only the changed files. 

What's in FreeBSD has a program?
* It is desirable (but not necessarily) to run from the command line.


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## drhowarddrfine (Dec 3, 2011)

dump and restore
rsync


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## gpw928 (Dec 3, 2011)

Hi,

Hmmm... This might be what my father would have called a "Dorothea Dixer".

Your options are to duplicate separate copies of the data; or to improve the MTBF of what you have; or both.

Both options duplicate data to some extent, and both thus "waste space". 

You can easily make your own time machine with ZFS.  But without "wasting space" on backups or redundancy, you are still at substantial risk.

You could waste somebody elses space.  e.g. subscribe to one of the online backup services, e.g. spideroak, or dropbox.  I'd be happy to use these for emergency recovery, but very reluctant to rely on them solely, or for long term recovery (too many of their ilk have lost client data).

Personally, I keep 5 copies of just about everything on various media (including external USB disks, eSATA disks, and whole spare bootable systems), with at least one full copy off site at all times -- and I don't consider it a waste of space at all!

Cheers,

-- 
Phil


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## copypaiste (Dec 3, 2011)

Besides aforementioned stock programs there are plenty of options in ports/sysutils or ports/misc. Also there's good old tar


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## fluca1978 (Dec 3, 2011)

I usually use tar (with compression) for local backep up data, and rsync for remote backup. I don't like very much the cloud solutions because I don't trust putting data of my clients over other not-owned systems, but for personal and not important data it is a valuable option. I tried a few times bacula dn it worked quite well for a complex backup/restore environemnt. Anyway, I tend to use simple solutions (tar and alike) for configuration files since it gives me the ability to inspect a backed up file from a command line.
Also versioning systems could be useful for backups. 
Please note that UFS already provides snapshots, that can be configured to act as "emergency" roll back of certain files. Even ZFS has a snapshot feature and there was an integration into nautilus to make it available via the GUI (see also this discussionabout ZFS-GUI).


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## valsorym (Dec 3, 2011)

Thank you all!
Maybe I'll use archivers/tar and net/rsync for their own purposes.
Specific task, me need to backup personal data of not large volume (up to 4 G).
Thank you again!


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