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BitTorrent Sync as backup?
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BitTorrent Sync as backup?

I need to back up my VPS, and I think I'd like to use BitTorrent Sync to do it.

I just want to back up to my home system. Setting it up from my VPS to home PC would be great. Has anyone done this previously? Do you think a VPS provider would have a problem with this?

James

Comments

  • I don't think a VPS provider would have a problem with this. I remember there was a provider here a few weeks ago offering BTSync storage VPSes.

  • it is possible, and works quite well. im currently backing up ~400 GB on a Backupsy server. couldnt be more pleased :)

  • I'm not sure how effective it would be for a full system backup due to permissions issues. I use BitTorrent Sync to sync some dynamic data between numerous VPSes but if it is deleted or corrupted in one location that version will propagate. As they're updated frequently btsync's history files get large quickly so I ended up disabling history and running rdiff-backup to do a compressed incremental daily backup on my Backupsy.

    To do just plain scheduled backups rather than ad-hoc synchronisation I'd highly recommend rdiff-backup. Alternatives that I've not tried are rsnapshot (faster, less space efficient) and duplicity (more advanced, supports Amazon S3, etc).

    You can run rdiff-backup from home as I did for a while, you just need to set up a cronjob to do it on an interval. No port forwarding required on that end, just outgoing SSH to the VPS. Set up key authentication for the root user on the VPS (assuming you want a backup of the full system) and let it go. Further incremental backups take a little while as it has to check every file to see if there have been updates, but are very bandwidth efficient as well as space efficient. The increments can be restored pretty easily, and you get a local copy of the remote system that can be manipulated directly without any silly proprietary archives.

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