Simple, Effective, scalable, and managable datacenter backup utility

 As some of you have heard I have been working on finding a pretty seamless automatic self managing backup solution for my home machines, as well as to finish a project up at work.   There were a couple requirements of the solution.  It had to be able to only backup bit level changes of the data.  Managed from a single central location.  E-mail Alerts.  Basic Reporting.  Web Based Administration.

The solution that I found that would fulfill all these requirements is BackupPC. BackupPC is written in Perl with a CGI web interface as well as a full CLI for automation of management.  One of the nice things is that it leverages a Perl module called File::RsyncP to be able to connect and iniate a rsync backup from a client that has rsync daemon running. This is a very easy solution to setup.  It literally only took me 2 hours to setup the server side start to finish, and a little bit to figure out the client side and how the whole server-client relationship works.

Currently I have my centralized backup server to poll every hour from all my machines including my NAS box and it pulls all the new / changed data using the rsync daemon, and then de-dupes the data on the backup server.

Pretty great little solution that doesn't really need a whole lot of hardware to run it.

Currently this is all that I have running it that is handling my backups (aprox 600gb before de-dupe)

Dual-Core AMD64 X2 2.6GHZ
4GB RAM
(2) 1TB Seagate Drives
(2)  500GB Seagate Drives
CentOS 5.2 fully patched