looking for backup suggestions

[Gregory Nowak]

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Hi all.

There are a good number of backup utilities out there, but none of the
ones I've found so far seem to be able to do what I'm looking for. So,
I thought I'd post what I'm looking for here, in the hope that someone
may know of something that I haven't stumbled across yet.

I'm looking for something that will create a list of all the packages
installed on my debian system, and put the list of installed packages,
along with any modified configuration files from the original debian
config files into a tar.bz2 file, which would then be uploaded to a
system via rsync over ssh, and then be compared to the file already on
the rsync system every 24 hours let's say.

The point here being that I could install a basic debian system onto a
empty box/drive, and have the backup utility fetch the tar archive
from the rsync system, install any packages that were installed on the
backed up system, but aren't installed yet on the new system, and copy
over the configuration files, thus  giving me essentially the same
debian system as the one of which the backup was made.

Failing that, does anyone know of a utility that could archive a
mounted file system, with the exception of some directories into a
tar.bz2 file, and upload that to a rsync server over ssh? Then, say
every 24 hours or so, the program would make a new tar.bz2 archive,
and use rsync again to synchronize the differences between the 2
archives. When I say with the exception of some directories, I mean
that if for example /dev/hda2 was mounted on /mnt, I would want it
excluded out of the hda1 archive, which would be mounted under /. So
in short, every directory except /mnt would be archived in this
example.

In either case, I'm looking for something that will place most of the
burden on the machine being backed up, and will place no additional
burden (other then transferring the archive) on the rsync server. In
other words, I'm looking for all the cpu intensive stuff to be done on
the machine that's being backed up or restored.

If nothing like what I'm looking for exists, I might put together
something myself, but I didn't want to have to reinvent the wheel. I
also hope that this makes sense.

Greg


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