He forgot one mistake: never take down your existing infrastructure before the new one is up.
The wrong way to switch operating systems on your server
41–50 of 77 posts
Re: The wrong way to switch operating systems on your server
#42The moment I see:
- shutdown
- backup + restore anew
- bring up
This triggers shivers. Nononono.
- backup (while your current gif is running) - restore and test—verify (via a separate vhost) - delta-backup, delta-restore and test-verify - stop, delta-backup, delta restore, start at new place
This way you minimize the amount of unexpected. Of course can be infeasible in some contexts…
Re: The wrong way to switch operating systems on your server
#43if you get nervous and ctrl-c things with no output, try using -v mode
This is fine, except for the annoying tools that think they need to then print their software version, and exit.
Re: The wrong way to switch operating systems on your server
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spoiler: That's not even part of his "lessons learned". I know whom I won't hire for my company IT or devops or whatnot.
Brutal honesty can be a wonderful trait all of its own in a team however. We can assume the author is not a BS artist from his very candid self-evaluation. This is a good thing he should hang onto. "My haphazard strategy resulted in three days of stress and frustration as I clambered to restore a self-hosting empire that I myself had reduced to ash."
Plus he's able to reflect on his own mistakes and articulate what he learned from them. Would hire.
Re: The wrong way to switch operating systems on your server
#45> I woke and the backup was finished! I wiped the VPS Just this single line made me scream in horror. Let me get this straight. He launched some backup command, it didn't output anything for hours, he suspected it hadn't done anything, aborted with ctrl-c, and then learned that he aborted it at 90%. Wipes the partial backup, starts again. After _that_ experience, he blindly trusts the result of _the same tool_, blind…
Spoiler: That's not even part of his "lessons learned". I know whom I won't hire for my company IT or devops or whatnot.
i did things like this in high school tool...
Re: The wrong way to switch operating systems on your server
#46> I woke and the backup was finished! I wiped the VPS Just this single line made me scream in horror. Let me get this straight. He launched some backup command, it didn't output anything for hours, he suspected it hadn't done anything, aborted with ctrl-c, and then learned that he aborted it at 90%. Wipes the partial backup, starts again. After _that_ experience, he blindly trusts the result of _the same tool_, blind…
Spoiler: That's not even part of his "lessons learned". I know whom I won't hire for my company IT or devops or whatnot.
Given you phrased this "for my company IT or devops or whatnot" I'm going to guess you have very little if any input into who gets hired into those positions, or at least shouldn't if you yourself don't know what the terminology for them should be.
Secondly taking shots at people like this does not encourage people to share learnable lessons like this - instead it encourages them to hide it away. Again if you are person in management you'd think you'd know better than to encourage people to hide mistakes instead of owning them and learning from them.
Finally - you do realize this is a kid right? Not some seasoned professional?
Re: The wrong way to switch operating systems on your server
#47Re: The wrong way to switch operating systems on your server
#48Don't consider it a backup until you've successfully restored the data from it. The first thing I do after setting up a new data backup is test a restore of the data. Only after that will I feel confident that the backup procedure works right. In the article author's case, an attempt to restore would have caught the problem of the missing .env files and the large movie files. As for the Ctrl-C on both the backup and…
> Don't consider it a backup until you've successfully restored the data from it. Ouch! I back up every 2 hours - should I REALLY restore from each of those?
I really meant to restore in order to test your backup process. It's important to test your backups periodically to ensure your process wasn't inadvertently broken, but you don't need to test each and every backup.
Re: The wrong way to switch operating systems on your server
#49One big WTF in my mind is the default lack of feedback with tarsnap. The -v should be implicit and automatic, and should need a flag to turn OFF, not on.
I mean, that’s just UI/UX 101. _Always_ provide feedback on progress, unless explicitly and intentionally silenced.
Re: The wrong way to switch operating systems on your server
#50One big WTF in my mind is the default lack of feedback with tarsnap. The -v should be implicit and automatic , and should need a flag to turn OFF, not on. I mean, that’s just UI/UX 101. _Always_ provide feedback on progress, unless explicitly and intentionally silenced.
Tools that are intended to be used in scripts often have fairly quiet default modes.
tar, cp, and many other *nix tools in that general realm tend to only speak up when something goes wrong, at least by default.
That said, I'm on your side and I think quiet mode should be the option with a reasonable human-friendly verbosity being default. Or even better, some form of detection of if it's being run interactively versus in a script.