dumbbackup

I'd rather have dumb backups now, than perfect backups too late.

After I gave up on BackupPC (version 3), I was left without a backup strategy. For a while, I fantasized about building my own backup system, which was getting more features as I thought about it, but very little in terms of implementation. It's easy to solve problems when you never write the code that actually does it...

Not having any backups, I wasn't feeling very safe about my data.

So I decided to go with a very simple strategy: back everything up with rsync now on my remote server (and later, NAS) so nothing horribly catastrophic and unrecoverable would happen to my data. Worst case, I could restore files by copying them back from the archives.

Installation

Just copy the dumbbackup file, e.g. in /usr/local/bin, and make it executable:

sudo curl --silent --create-dirs \
    --output /usr/local/bin/dumbbackup \
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/book/dumbbackup/master/dumbbackup
sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/dumbbackup

Features

• Dumb

  Backups are made by rsync-ing a tree to a backup location. This is the dumbest simplest backup scheme ever.

• Some data deduplication

  dumbbackup is not bup.

  The only data deduplication it offers is by hard-linking identicals versions of the same file. That means each backup directory is a full backup, and having multiple backups of the same version of the same file means they all refer to the same location.

• Full backups, done in an differential way

  Each backup directory contains a full backup.

  Thanks to hardlinks, multiple copies of the same file acrosse multiple backups only use the space once.

  Thanks to rsync, the data transfered for backing up an unmodified file is minimal.

• Remote backups

  The versatility of dumbbackup comes from rsync:

  It can copy locally, to/from another host over any remote shell, or to/from a remote rsync daemon.

• A single script, all-included

  Although the logic of dumbbackup is now split over multiple modules, you only have one script to download and install to use it.

• Few dependencies

  You need to have perl and rsync installed. You may also use nice and ionice, if available.

History

• October 2013

  The first version was a shell script that would generate and execute an rsync command similar to this:

  rsync -aH --partial --log-file=/backup/2022-01-18.log --exclude=* / /backup/2013-10-24
  

• January 2014

  The script grew slowly, acquiring more and more options, until it became silly to keep doing it in shell. So I eventually rewrote it in Perl.

• January 2022

  Again, the script ended up doing many things and became unwieldy, so I split it into several subcommands started by the same frontend.

  This made it easier to separate the concerns and requirements between the backup and cleanup command.