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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?

#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.

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

#5
1. Place desired data to back up on a drive (which may be network attached).

2. Clone said drive to an external drive. Detach and lock it in a water/fireproof box when not in use.

3. Swap external drive with another that is stored off site every week or two.

4. Swap with yet another off site external drive less often (a few months).

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

#6
Backup to external hard drive with btrfs. Rsync is used to copy the full source file system, with short exception lists for stuff I don't want backupped. After the sync, a btrfs snapshot is taken to get history. These napshots are removed with an exponential strategy (many snapshots are recent, few are old, the oldest is always kept), keeping ~30 snapshots a year.

Backup takes ~10min for searching 1TB of disk space. The daily diff is typically 6..15 GB, mostly due to braindead mail storage format...

I want to keep it simple but still have full history and diff backup: no dedicated backup tool, but rsync + btrfs. A file-by-file copy is easy to check and access (and the history also looks that way).

If the source had btrfs, I would use btrfs send/receive to speed it up and make it atomic.

I have two such backup disks in different places. One uses an automatic backup trigger during my lunch break, the other is triggered manually (and thus not often enough).

The sources are diverse (servers, laptops, ...). The most valued one uses 2 x 1 TB SSDs in RAID1 for robustness.

All disks are fully encrypted.

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

#8
post #2

No workflow, we just use BackupPC ( http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ ) - cant recommend it enough. Restores are easy, monitoring and automation on different schedules is all built in. It's really great.

BackupPC has helped me restore my RabbitMQ queues several times. Love BackupPC.

It has an ugly looking interface, but the core of the product is super reliable.

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