Disaster Recovery and Backups

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LVM is a Logical Volume Manager for the Linux kernel. With LVM you can abstract your storage space and have "virtual partitions" which are easier to modify.

In LVM, there are some key words you should keep in mind:

PV=Physical volume
VG=Voulume group
LV=Logical volume


With LVM you can more easily handle your partitions (logical volumes) than normal hard drive partitions. For example, you can:

-Use any number of disks as one big disk(VG)
-Have partitions(LV) stretched over several disks (they can be as big as all of your disk storage together)
-Resize/create/delete partitions(LV) and disks(VG) online! (yes online)
-Create small partitions(LV) and resize them "dynamically" as they get more filled
-And the best of all, create SNAPSHOTS (that is the exact picture of your partition at a given time ... its a long story)

Have a look at this Article, I hope it will help you understand what lvm is
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/410

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Regarding Bacula(ing)



Linux: Bacula is for Everyone* (backup software)

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Directory/File Synchronization Across Systems

Synchrorep: A simple way to synchronize folders

{UPDATED}
Setting Up Unison File Synchronization Between Two Servers On Debian Squeeze

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Backups with rsnaphot to external USB drives

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you can backup data to "Amazon’s S3 cloud services, and Rackspace, a Windows share, FTP, SSH, WebDAV.........."

Read more Deja Dup-Backup-Restore

Here's Another Areca Backup is an Open Source personal backup solution:
Details at Be as simple as possible to set up : No complex configuration files to edit - Your backup configuration (which is stored as an XML file) can be edited with Areca's graphical user interface...

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Setting Up Network RAID1 With DRBD On Ubuntu 11.10

how to set up network RAID1 with the help of DRBD on two Ubuntu 11.10 systems. DRBD stands for Distributed Replicated Block Device and allows you to mirror block devices over a network. This is useful for high-availability setups (like a HA NFS server) because if one node fails, all data is still available from the other node.

...Read more...

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Rsync Snapshots: Space Saving & Fast Recovery

De-duplication! That is the keyword and if your backup storage hardware does not support it natively you still need it. That is the focus of this article.
eXplore more -->

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Back In Time, Automatic Back-Up Tool For Linux

Linux distros such as Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu have quite a lot of data back-up tools which allows a user to back-up their data with greater ease. One such tool is called 'Back In Time'. The project description says, "Back In Time is a simple backup system for Linux inspired from “flyback project” and “TimeVault”. The backup is done by taking snapshots of a specified set of directories."

eXplore more >>>

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ownCloud is a free software alternative to some proprietary web services and it currently includes file management (with built-in file sharing), music streaming, calendar, contacts and more - all running on your computer or server.

Desktop file syncing is now possible with ownCloud, through Csync and Mirall:

Csync is a command line synchronization tool that comes with an ownCloud module
Mirall is a Qt tray sync client that uses Csync and allows you to synchronize data between the local machine and ownCloud.

See more

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JBackpack is a personal backup program. It features incremental backups, network transparency and encryption. JBackpack uses rdiff-backup for all backup and restore functions, SSHFS and SMB to access remote file systems and EncFS to encrypt backup destination directories.

JBackpack runs on the GNU/Linux operating system, Mac OS X (10.5 or newer) and Windows.

More Details...
Downloads...

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LuckyBackup

In our daily activities we may have to manage multiple files from different locations, from which, every now and then edit them. It can also arise the need to synchronize folders over the network and often we do not know how to do it, luckybackup may be the solution for you, a convenient graphical interface for a powerful command line tool like rsync.

More Details...

LuckBackup Home
Features
Download

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Backups are usually made in one of two ways - either file-based which means that single files are backed up, often via synchronization and on an external disk, or image-based which means that a whole partition is stuffed into an image file that can be restored on the partition, containing everything there was on it. This tutorial covers image-based backups using Partimage from a live desktop environment.

Read More...

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"Creating Encrypted FTP Backups With duplicity And duply On Debian Squeeze"

This tutorial shows how you can use duplicity and duply to create encrypted (so that nobody with access to the backup server can read sensitive data in your backups) backups on the provider's remote backup server over FTP. duply is a duplicity wrapper script that allows us to use duplicity without interaction (i.e., you do not have to type in any passwords).

Read more...

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"Csync2 a filesystem syncronization tool for Linux"

Sometimes is useful to sync automatically files over the net between 2 or more computers, maybe you want to keep some configuration files aligned on different servers or maybe you have a cluster of web servers and you want to keep their document root aligned so your customer will always see the same result.
You could do this with a network filesystem like NFS, GlusterFS or Coda File system.
But why do complicated things when you could easily do this just keeping in sync the local filesystem ?

Read More...

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Nowadays virtualization is for anyone and virtual machines run smoothly in every new hardware. However people seem to avoid it and there is an explanation. The “complicated” interfaces and the ignorance of the use-cases of virtualization.

The possibilities of virtualization are endless and just one of them is to backup our files, databases and whatever else.

Read More...