From: news@druck.org.uk   
      
   On 23/06/2025 08:45, The Natural Philosopher wrote:   
   > Rsync is an excellent backup tool. Not the least because it contains an   
   > exact copy of the source.   
   >   
   > Restore is simply a question of using it in reverse.   
      
   I set up my backup system specifically for Raspberry Pi's using (at the   
   time) unreliable SD cards, and making recovery to a new SD card as quick   
   as possible.   
      
   Each time I create a new Raspberry Pi I set it up and then take a copy   
   of the SD card with dd on to Networked storage. Each night this image is   
   then mounted and rsync commands issued to update any changes files in   
   each partition. That way if a card fails, I have a day old image I can   
   dd straight to a new SD card and have the Pi backup and running. The   
   only mildly involving bit was specifying the list of exclude directories   
   of things which don't need to be backed up.   
      
   At the start or each week and month, I use zerofree on the latest image   
   to clear any unused space so it compresses well with gzip, and keep   
   those compressed versions in case any SD card corrupted creeps in to the   
   daily image, so I can restore to a week or month ago if needed. I also   
   keep the last backup before changing major OS versions in case of things   
   like Bookworm updates causing problems.   
      
   All the stuff on the network storage is mirrored to several other on   
   site and off site discs, again using rsync.   
      
   I've got nice graphs produced by the logs, so I can see that last night   
   my 16 active Linux Raspberry Pi's backed up a total 1402MB of changed   
   data in 2188 files in 425 seconds. The last time I updated the OS on all   
   of them in May it was 25GB, 389,436 files in 1:01:04.   
      
   ---druck   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)