I’m in the middle of upgrading our backup setups at work. Right now I have several machines using urbackup. The server software is on a virtual machine and the actual location for the backup files is on a nas. I am backing up the VM regularly and the NAS is a mirrored raid so the odds of losing those backup files are pretty remote. We also want to start storing some data in an offsite location so these files might be copied to that site as well.
However I would like to know what the best way to backup the backup dir would be? Can I just use an rsync to copy the files? I know urbackup uses hard and soft links so I didn’t know if that would cause an issue?
Thank you.
I’ve been looking into this too, specifically in order to make a copy of the backup directory in cloud storage.
Cloud storage typically doesn’t support symbolic links, but I found that rclone has a –links flag that converts symbolic links into and back again from a special .rclonelink file that contains the link path inside, in theory meaning you can store the backup directory on a volume that doesn’t support links as long as you use rclone again when you’re copying it back to a volume that does.
There are also other flags that allow you to ignore links, or follow them and write the file it links to (your storage size will balloon) that are common across things like rsync.
Haven’t fully tested myself yet but give it a look.
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve used rsync but never heard of rclone. I’ll definitely look into it.
Thanks again.