faubackup - Backup System using a Filesystem for Storage

faubackup [options] srcdir [destdir]

faubackup --clean[=destdir]

faubackup [--list[=destdir]]

faubackup uses a filesystem on a hard drive for incremental and full backups. This enables the backup to be accessable through standard filesystem tools.

Later Backups to the same filesystem will automatically be incremental, as unchanged files are only hard-linked with the existing version of the file.

Executing 'faubackup srcdir destdir' is a bit like 'cp -a srcdir destdir/`date`'. That is, it will copy everything from srcdir to a subdirectory of destdir. This directory is named after the time of the backup (format 'YYYY-MM-DD@hh:mm:ss'). All filenames, permissions, contents will be preserved. It can cope with soft-, hardlinks and with holes in files.

The big advantage over a simple copy is the use of hard-links between unchanged files to minimize disk space usage. You can execute faubackup on a regular basis, and any files which haven't changed between these calls are not copied again, but are hardlinked between the various backup-directories. This is similar to incremental backups, where only changed files are written to the tape.

If srcdir or destdir contains a colon (:), it is considered a remote backup. The part preceeding the colon will be the machine to backup from, the part following the colon will be the directory to backup. faubackup must be able to get a root shell account on the remote machine, in order to backup its files. On the remote machines, PATH should include the directory containing the faubackup sub-programs. When using ssh, this can be achieved by setting it in /root/.ssh/environment.

If destdir is omitted, a default will be chosen. It contains the machine-name and srcdir of the backup and may be customized via faubackup.conf(5)

FauBackup may be configured to keep certain backups for a long time and remove others. Have a look at traditional backup systems. You have tapes for daily, weekly, monthly and yearly backups, and store them according to your local backup policy. FauBackup can do this for you on harddisks, too. That is, it can keep some yearly, weekly, etc. backups for you and automatically remove other obsoleted backups.

Four different backup-types are recognized: daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. The first existing backup in such an interval will be considered belonging to the coresponding type. Thus, the first backup in a month (eg. 2000-12-01@06:30:00) will be a monthly backup; the first backup in 2001 will be of all four types, as January 1st, 2001 is a Monday.

The number of backups kept for each type is configureable (See faubackup.conf(5) ). If a backup doesn't belong to such a type (eg. second backup in a day), or is too old for that type, it will be removed on faubackup --clean.

FauBackup can print some informations about the backups kept on filesystem. If used without verbose output, it just displays the first daily, weekly, monthly and yearly backup made.

If used with verbose output, a list of all backups will be displayed. For every backup, the number of files which was added or removed by this backup will be shown, together with the overall size of these files and the size of files exclusively used by this backup. In addition, a backup will get marked, when it is the first of an backup interval (daily, weekly, ...).

-h, --help

Show short help page and exit.

--version

Show version string and exit.

-l, --list [destdir]

Show information about the backups already created. If combined with verbose (see below), information about the size of the backups is given, too. See DISPLAYING INFO above. If no destdir is given, search for possible backups in the standard location.

-v, --verbose

Show verbose output. This includes all filenames being read/written.

--ignore=pattern

Add patterns for files that should not be backed up. Those will be directly passed to faubackup-find.

--rsh=command

The command used to get access to remote machines. Default is to use the FAUBACKUP_RSH environtment variable if it exists, "rsh" otherwise.

-o srcdir, -i destdir

The 'do only half the backup' options. Use them to pipe your backup to some other location. ('faubackup -o srcdir | somepipe | faubackup -i destdir')

--clean [destdir]

Remove old backups from destdir. If destdir is omitted, search for possible destination directories in the standard location.

--years=number, -y number,

--months=number, -m number, --weeks=number, -w number, --days=number, -d number Specify how long to keep backups on --clean. These options override the settings in the configuration file.

--keep-last

As described above, the first backup in an interval will be kept for later use. If you do an automated backup in the morning and want to do an additional backup after some important work, this is annoying. When using this option, the last daily backup will be kept, instead of the first. Other backups will be unaffected (weekly, etc).

--atime-preserve

This option is directly passed to faubackup-gather. When set, faubackup tries to reset the access time after reading files. Doing so will update the ctime, too. Don't use this option if you are using other backup software in parallel, because it might think that all your files have changed.

--one-file-system, -L

This option is directly passed to faubackup-find. When set, then faubackup won't backup directories from file systems other than the one containing the source directory.

FAUBACKUP_RSH

Default value for --rsh switch.

/etc/faubackup.conf

Configuration file. See faubackup.conf(5) for details.

destdir/date/

Your backup will be available here.

destdir/date/..inodes

This directory contains all inodes included in this backup. They are hashed across several (sub-)directories inside ..inodes. This directory is neede to be able to hardlink with existing backups of the same srcdir.

You should not rely on your harddisk as the sole backup medium ;-). The Author recommends to regularly tar (a selection of) the disk backup to a tape, which should be stored in a different room.

Additionaly, you should be careful when creating your backup filesystem. As directories cannot be shared across several backups, they consume an considerable amount of inodes. On filesystems with a limited number of inodes (like ext2), one may need to increase the inode limit on filesystem creation.

You need a filesystem with stable device id and inode number so that faubackup can correctly find your files again. This may be violated by some remote filesystems, for example Samba.

Please report all bugs to faubackup-user@lists.sourceforge.net.

Please send your ideas/comments to help improve FauBackup.

faubackup.conf(5), faubackup-gather(8), faubackup-scatter(8), faubackup-find(8),

FauBackup is Copyright (c) 2000-01 Dr. Volkmar Sieh, (c) 2000-04 Martin Waitz. Developed at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg.

FauBackup comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version. Look at COPYING for details.

This manual page was written by Martin Waitz <tali@admingilde.org>.

mailto:faubackup-user@lists.sourceforge.net