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Ask HN: How do you backup your linux system?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your linux system?

#61

Post by Yetanfou »

I use rsnapshot to create hourly/daily/weekly/monthly snapshots of configured systems. Backups are written to a dedicated drive (which just started showing SMART-errors at so I'll replace it ASAP). I regularly create PGP-encrypted archives of selected sets which get stored off-site, spread around the 'net on cloud hosting services. I'm also thinking about making an arrangement with some friends and family members who have a) good network connections and b) personal servers and c) a need to backup such to swap off-site backup copies - I'll store yours if you store mine. I currently have about 100 GB in 'critical' data which is stored off-site.

I also keep current copies of most configuration data for all systems, mainly by backing up their /etc directories. This is also done for network equipment and remote network configuration data (zone files, etc).

Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your linux system?

#62

Post by pacificengima »

Bacula manages our network backups to an Overland Storage tape library. While involved to setup, I found it worthwhile given the capabilities it offers and reliability. Bacula can also backup to file system volumes if you don't have tape libraries but would still like the other features (eg encryption, network-wide backup, file catalogues, retention and recycling rules etc).

Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your linux system?

#63

Post by gerdesj »

trelliscoded wrote: post #38

I don't back up my systems. Everything important is in some cloud storage somewhere, and I have network boot into installers set up on my network. There's actually one machine where I ran out of space on the local disk and didn't feel like getting up to replace it, so I copied it into a bigger volume on one of my servers and it's been booting off of that ever since. My customers and employers have all had these rube…

"Everything important is in some cloud storage somewhere"

Delete one of them and then get it restored by your supplier - I assume you've done that already. I did.

Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your linux system?

#64

Post by libx »

I use rsnapshot [1] for /home data and afio [2] for other stuff (offline databases, system, photos, ...)

With rsnapshot, I have hourly, daily, weekly and monthly backups that use hard links for the saving disk space. These backup dirs can be mounted read-only.

With afio, files above some defined size are compressed and then added to the archive, so that if some compression goes wrong, only that file may be lost, the archive is not corrupted. Can have incremental backups.

From the afio webpage: Afio makes cpio-format archives. It deals somewhat gracefully with input data corruption, supports multi-volume archives during interactive operation, and can make compressed archives that are much safer than compressed tar or cpio archives. Afio is best used as an `archive engine' in a backup script.

[1] http://rsnapshot.org/ [2] http://members.chello.nl/k.holtman/afio.html

Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your linux system?

#65

Post by BeetleB »

I use a cloud based service to back up hand selected directories.

I run a weekly script to rsync one HD to another. The backup HD is exactly the same size and partitioned identically. I had a HD crash some years ago and it was fairly trivial to swap out the drives (probably needed to make some changes to the MBR). Unfortunately, I had an HD crash some months ago and it was not as easy this time round. Apparently my rsync would fail in the middle and so a lot of files were stale. Unbootable. Fortunately, all the critical data was copied.

I should have a smarter backup script that will alert me on failure to rsync.

Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your linux system?

#66

Post by BeetleB »

blfr wrote: post #19

I don't back up the system. Drive failures are so rare nowadays that I will reinstall more often because of hardware changes. The important stuff (projects, dotfiles) I keep on Tarsnap. I also rsync my entire home directory to an external drive every other week or so. Similar for servers but I do back up /etc as well.

>Drive failures are so rare nowadays that I will reinstall more often because of hardware changes.

2 HD failures in the last 4 years. Not rare for me :-(

Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your linux system?

#67

Post by kxyvr »

gerdesj wrote: post #60
kxyvr wrote: post #42

Perhaps someone could offer a related suggestion. At the moment, I use rsync to backup files to external hard drives. One of the difficulties that I run into is that some folders I want to mirror exactly between my computer and the backup. Other folders I want to only add files, but not delete, to the backup. Still others, like git repositories, I'd like to bundle rather than backup the directory itself. Finally, I m…

No, that is not backup or DR or BC (Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity). What you are describing is personal data management mixed up with backup.

Interesting. I've not heard that term before. Can you suggest a personal data management tool that works well with one of the suggested backup solutions in this thread?

Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your linux system?

#69

Post by RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u »

bluGill wrote: post #3

Put all personal data on a zfs z2 RAID system (FreeNAS). Take regular snapshots. Someday I'm going to get a second offsite system to do ZFS backups to, but so far the above has served well. Then again I've been lucky enough to never have a hard drive fail, so the fact that I can lose 2 without losing data is pretty good. I'm vulnerable to fire and theft, but the most likely data loss scenarios are covered.

Even in 2017 you still can't sneakernet sometimes. I have a ZFS file server similar to yours, and it acts as the backup destination for all my other devices. Then, I use two USB HDDs to back up the server, then bring one to work. If either is attached a nightly script bring it up to date. I just keep rotation the two between home & work.

Re: Ask HN: How do you backup your linux system?

#70

Post by Comkid »

For my backups, I use rclone with Backblaze B2 and Google Cloud Storage (Nearline) using Crypt (with the same password and password2 for both B2 and GCS). This gives me the benefit of file level encryption, with filename encryption too. In my case, I'd rather not use encrypted archives in case a bit got flipped and rendered my archive useless.

I have a systemd timer to run (incremental) backups every 3 hours, and I plan on setting up a mechanism to automatically verify all of my data that has been uploaded.

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