This page describes the main steps to setup rsnapshot for systematically backing up data to MyBook.
The main reference to rsnapshot is the rsnapshot HOWTO.
Rsnapshot runs on MyBook, pulling the data from a PC. It uses rsync (typically over ssh) for communication. Pushing the data to MyBook (i.e. running rsnapshot at the computer to be backed-up) is not so straightforward. The original rsnapshot FAQ precludes it:
http://www.rsnapshot.org/faq.html
There are some recent work-arounds to it — see the thread
http://lists.samba.org/archive/rsync/2007-December/019470.html
http://lists.samba.org/archive/rsync/2008-January/019601.html
http://lists.samba.org/archive/rsync/2008-January/019607.html
but the "push" approach is not so straightforward and we have not tested it.
Main steps we have followed in the rsnapshot setup procedure:
- Installed rsnapshot and its dependencies in MyBook using ipkg:
- /opt/bin/ipkg install rsnapshot
- Had to manually add the dir containing libperl.so to /etc/ld.conf and then run ldconfig
- Had to setup public-key based, non-interactive ssh authentication, following http://troy.jdmz.net/rsnapshot/
- Since rsync needs lots of memorysee here, we need to allocate extra swap space (I added 256 MB; backing-up many small files might require more). For this one can follow
- The backup procedure can be automated using cron jobs, as described in the rsnapshot HOWTO.
Backup options can be adjusted by editing the rsnapshot configuration file
/opt/etc/rsnapshot.conf
The conf's parameters are described in detail in the rsnapshot HOWTO.
An example rsnapshot.conf is attached rsnapshot.conf.