A CBT for Linux

general discussion
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Excerpt:

The Datto Block Driver (dattobd) solves the above problems and brings functionality similar to VSS on Windows to a broad range of Linux kernels. Dattobd is an open source Linux kernel module for point-in-time live snapshotting. Dattobd can be loaded onto a running Linux machine (without a reboot) and creates a COW file on the original volume representing any block device at the instant the snapshot is taken. After the first snapshot, the driver tracks incremental changes to the block device and therefore can be used to efficiently update existing backups by copying only the blocks that have changed.

Sounds interesting.

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Yeah, that is somewhere on the Todo list. Should not be too hard to integrate. Since a few days dattobd also got Open Source competition from veeamsnap. So that would also be an (additional) option for CBT for Linux. Or the same thing LVMsync does, except one needs to keep the LVM snapshots around for that.

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For those interested, I wrote a HOWTO for this driver, so you can use it as a backup system (snapshots survive reboot).

It also demonstrates how this driver would be installed (in the initramfs) for possible use with other backup systems, such as UrBackup.

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