[sf-lug] perl backup script, and other perl goodies

[Asheesh Laroia]

On Mon, 18 Aug 2008, Michael Paoli wrote:

> One of the discussions that came up at the SF-LUG meeting this evening 
> was backups, ... including a perl backup script I'd written a while 
> back.

I'll throw on my two cents' worth:

For backups, I use a tool called dirvish.  Every night, it sshs to the 
computers I want to back up, and it generates a directory tree like this:

.../2008-08-22/tree/
.../2008-08-22/tree/etc/
.../2008-08-22/tree/etc/passwd
...

That {date}/tree/ directory has a *full* snapshot of the filesystem as of 
the time the backup job ran.

Any files that haven't changed are hard-linked to last-night's backup 
rather than copied, so the data are only stored once, so even though they 
look like full backups, the space cost is like incremental backups.

It's very nice to be able to "cd" into yesterday, and it's very very nice 
to, when remote disks crash, just send over last night's backup.

-- Asheesh.

-- 
Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else
follows in the same way.
 		-- Alan J. Perlis