Network backups / efficiency

[ian....@gmail.com]

Hi, I'm trying out zbackup and I wonder if anyone has suggestions for my usecase.

I have a four client machines I want to back up to a central server.  The server itself is backed up, and its backups get rotated off-site.  This is much simpler than one backup disk per client, or a single huge backup disk which has to be rotated between clients.

While I'm experimenting, I have the backup server mounted via NFS on my test client (a laptop), and I'm backing up /etc, /var/, and /home.  I ran the initial backup last night, and it took around 12 hours to complete, with the fans running full tilt the whole time.  This is mostly okay, it's ~180gb and moving everything over the network, I expected it to take a long time.

I hoped a second backup would perform better, so I kicked one off.  That took around two hours to complete, also with the fans blasting.  That's too slow and resource-intensive to run daily.

I've seen suggestions to zbackup locally, then rsync to a central server.  That won't work for my case, because there's not enough free space on the clients; and also because (I think) it means data isn't deduplicated across machines.

Can the situation be improved?  All the examples pipe a huge tarball into zbackup; maybe I should lean on tar's incremental backup instead, and pipe those into zbackup?

Open to suggestions, including for a different backup program that might be a better fit.

[Dave Warren]

On Thu, Jun 18, 2020, at 13:29, ian....@gmail.com wrote:

I've seen suggestions to zbackup locally, then rsync to a central server.  That won't work for my case, because there's not enough free space on the clients; and also because (I think) it means data isn't deduplicated across machines.

Can the situation be improved?  All the examples pipe a huge tarball into zbackup; maybe I should lean on tar's incremental backup instead, and pipe those into zbackup?

Open to suggestions, including for a different backup program that might be a better fit.

I switched to restic due to this particular issue. I have servers that simply don't have the available space (nor the ability to dd space in a reasonable way).

As with anything, there are ups and downs to both, I still use zbackup in some places, although truth be told, I expect to deploy restic as a default choice going forward.