The sys admin's daily grind: Backup2l

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Article from Issue 159/2014
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At his cozy home, sys admin Charly has always used rsnapshot to back up his data. Although things will be staying this way for server backups, he has found something more manageable for backing up the Kühnast family's desktop PCs.

Backups are inevitable, and that includes desktop PCs, even the ones at home. However, in my four walls, I do not need a professional enterprise backup warehouse, and I feel no genuine desire to pay the license fee for it. I back up everything on a small Synology NAS and the NAS, in turn, is backed up on two large USB drives.

On the NAS, I have shared a directory by the name of linbackup; below that is a subdirectory for every machine to be backed up – a total of 14 right now. My children are obviously growing up and probably starting to hoard hardware. I really wonder who they take after. There is also a gamelauncher directory; incidentally, this is where I back up the Windows partition.

Lately, the backup itself has been handled by backup2l [1], which I've tried out in the past few days as a lightweight alternative to rsnapshot [2]. Backup2l can be controlled by cron and creates a configurable number of incremental backups. Three parameters are responsible for this in the backup2l.conf configuration file.

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