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Sun, 07 Sep 2008

/Admin/backups/misc: Review / Comparison of rdiff-backup[1] & backuppc[2]

I have used both. backuppc has some clear advantages:

More integration and more automation, avoiding contact with the command line and crontab which are inevitable with rdiff-backup.
More protocol options for backups (rdiff-backup seems to just do rsync over ssh) which might make backing up of Micro$oft machines easier, for instance.
Compression of the archive, saving a lot of space in BIG backups.
Backups from many different specified directories on many different machines running different operating systems are all transparently saved in the same archive, with hard-linking of identical files on different machines allowing even more dramatic disk space savings.
A web interface for control of the backup process, and point and click restores.

In a word, backuppc is truly an enterprise-class piece of software, highly recommended for big complex backup situations.

However, there is a price to pay for all that automation and all those features:

rdiff-backup is much faster and lighter. backuppc is a very large resource pig, even when reniced to a very low priority. I was running it on a PIII 800 Mhz machine, and it brought that machine to its knees every time it ran. Backuppc had no problems completing its duties, but don't try to do *anything* else on the backup server while backuppc is running.
rdiff-backup is much simpler to understand and get running for a simple situation. One can bang away at backuppc's complicated configuration files for hours trying to figure out what is wrong.
Recovery of files from an rdiff-backup archive can be as simple as copying the file file over, ie. "cp" or "scp". backuppc's files are buried in a complex compressed archive.

I like both of them very much, but they are suited for quite different situations. If you are backing up several machines or more, and you have one machine with a lot of disk space that you can devote largely if not entirely to backuppc, backuppc is probably the way to go. Any lesser requirements are probably best met with rdiff-backup.

[1] http://rdiff-backup.nongnu.org/
[2] http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

posted at: 07:20 | path: /Admin/backups/misc | permanent link to this entry

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Sun, 07 Sep 2008