[thelist] Server Backup System

[Beam]

> What I'd like to do is automatically make a complete backup once a week of
> all websites, then an incremental backup daily of all files that have
> changed.  The program would login by itself.  I'd like something that would
> run on Windows on my backup machine.  Bonus points for my being able to
> access the backup machine through VPN when I am out of the country.
>
rsync would be perfect for this. It runs over ssh. Only problem is, for the
Windows side you need to compile and install it under Cygwin, apparently.
http://optics.ph.unimelb.edu.au/help/rsync/rsync_install.html
Personally I would rather install Linux on some old PC and make it a backup
server, but hey.

> Then, if I ever had to, I'd like to be able to recover individual files or
> roll back to last week's version with ease.  I don't want to download all
> the files daily, and I would like the week's files to be zipped up.  I want
> to be able to archive these on CD, then I'll have backups from old
> websites, which seem to come in very handy.
If you have disk space, you could have a exact mirror of whatever directory
trees you wanted (or it could be zipped using an at command, maybe?). rsync
would only download the files that have changed, and even then _only the
PARTS that have changed_ due to the unmatched brilliance of the rsync
algorithm. And you could just zip and burn to CD every so often.