Comment by chasil

For my Oracle Linux systems, I rely on the vendor ReaR RPM package for the baseline backup. This is similar to the "Ignite" utility that I used in my HP-UX days.

https://relax-and-recover.org/

This is two-fold useful, first as it enables boot from backup media for total recovery, second in that it creates a backup.tar.gz that holds everything that was not explitictly ignored in the /etc/rear/local.conf file.

I'm running Oracle databases on these systems (and the local.conf is configured to ignore the datafile directories). I have standby databases (not Dataguard in that I don't have online redolog replication) that allow me to recover them to the primary in a disaster, with some loss of committed transactions.

I finally have rsync configured for some scratch temporary files.

I have dallied with btrfs snapshot replication for home directories (in a loopback mount). My vendor support (via a CSI number) has been on and off, so I don't use btrfs in areas that we need it most.

My replacements do not like the complexity (and I am retiring).