Advice on backups

[Paul Schmehl]

--On December 5, 2018 at 4:44:40 PM -0600 Valeri Galtsev 
<galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>
> On 12/5/18 4:29 PM, Paul Schmehl wrote:
>> I manage a couple of servers on the internet. There are no backup or
>> test servers, so I have to do everything on live systems that are
>> serving webpages, handling mail, etc.
>
> I used bacula for quite long, and recently I'm gradually switching to
> bacula's fork: bareos. I really recommend bareos (or bacula), it is real
> backup, open source, enterprise level quality, etc... And yes, I did have
> to recover stuff, including versions on particular date etc.
>
> I hope, this helps.
>
I used to be the port maintainer for bacula.

The sites that I maintain do not change frequently enough to justify 
incremental backups, and the site owners don't even care if all the recent 
data is lost. So, once daily full backups are more than sufficient for my 
purposes.

The idea isn't to capture every single change but simply to ensure that the 
sites will come back up after a failure.

If I lost a hard drive, restoring from tarballs is fine, and any lost data 
would be lost permanently. These sites don't have the same needs as 
commercial or professional sites wrt backups and restoration.

I once had to restore a site (lost a hard drive) over a dialup modem from 
1,200 miles away, and while it took a really long time, it worked fine and 
no one noticed that anything was missing (including me.) Those backups were 
daily rsyncs stored on the second server.

Paul Schmehl, Retired
As if it wasn't already obvious, my opinions
are my own and not those of my employer.
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