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Backups Aren't Simple

filipovski.net

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Re: Backups Aren't Simple

#31

Post by jeffbee »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #22
publlus_enigma wrote: post #20

There are four times in my life I have suffered regrettable data loss incidents. The first was when the telephone pole outside our house was struck directly by lightning. Not only was it the loudest thing I have ever heard, the current surged through the telephone line, into the internal fax modem, and fries everything within its vicinity. I was 10. I did have backuos, but only only floppy and they didn't cover every…

>I now shoot 2 cards simultaneously A very lovely change over the last 8 years or so lol. I came up in film during the DSLR revolution. 5D2’s/7D’s/Rebels (i series) years. 8bit 420 nasty aliasing recording on single cards and praying baby. Magic lantern booted on those same SD’s!

Mainstream DSLRs with dual card slots came out 22 years ago.

Re: Backups Aren't Simple

#32

Post by voiceofunreason »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #27

A friend of mine used to work at Veritas[0] making enterprise data retention solutions. When I spoke about their product as being "making backups", he corrected me by saying: We are not in the backup business. We are in the restoration business. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup_Exec

Backups are boring. Restores, on the other hand, are often exciting.

Re: Backups Aren't Simple

#33

Post by returningfory2 »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #27

A friend of mine used to work at Veritas[0] making enterprise data retention solutions. When I spoke about their product as being "making backups", he corrected me by saying: We are not in the backup business. We are in the restoration business. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup_Exec

Correct. In data protection, backup is not the feature. Restore is the feature.

Re: Backups Aren't Simple

#34

Post 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).

Re: Backups Aren't Simple

#36

Post by Gigachad »

publlus_enigma wrote: post #20

There are four times in my life I have suffered regrettable data loss incidents. The first was when the telephone pole outside our house was struck directly by lightning. Not only was it the loudest thing I have ever heard, the current surged through the telephone line, into the internal fax modem, and fries everything within its vicinity. I was 10. I did have backuos, but only only floppy and they didn't cover every…

>I've been weary of using rewritable media for some time now as a consequence

I briefly considered using bluray disks as a backup for my photos and other critical docs. But getting a decent bluray burner seems not so easy these days with most production winding down. Next best thing looks like the "object lock" feature on object store services that prevents deleting objects for a certain time.

Re: Backups Aren't Simple

#37

Post by nine_k »

snizovtsev wrote: post #30

I'm polishing my backup system right now, and found that `tar | zstd | gpg` plus a small vibe-coded wrapper is pretty much all I need. GNU tar has its own incremental index via `--listed-incremental=FILE`. Unlike Borg or Restic, which have their own more complicated repository formats, this leaves me with just one additional file (the `.snar`) alongside a dumb, portable full-disk tar archive. The nice part is that, u…

How well did it work for restoring?

For me, the ability to mount a backup and look at a particular file proved to be important. Also, I restored from my backups four times; two of them was moving between machines, pretty quickly.

Re: Backups Aren't Simple

#38

Post by Terr_ »

Gigachad wrote: post #36
publlus_enigma wrote: post #20

There are four times in my life I have suffered regrettable data loss incidents. The first was when the telephone pole outside our house was struck directly by lightning. Not only was it the loudest thing I have ever heard, the current surged through the telephone line, into the internal fax modem, and fries everything within its vicinity. I was 10. I did have backuos, but only only floppy and they didn't cover every…

>I've been weary of using rewritable media for some time now as a consequence I briefly considered using bluray disks as a backup for my photos and other critical docs. But getting a decent bluray burner seems not so easy these days with most production winding down. Next best thing looks like the "object lock" feature on object store services that prevents deleting objects for a certain time.

I pretty much instantly wrote off physical media because I know I won't reliably move it to a separate location. If I'm going to have backups, I want ones that are not within fire/flood range of my computer.

In terms of preventing "oops" moments, I'm mainly relying on software (restic) for that, where I trust that (A) backups always append data rather than replacing and (B) it's logic works for marking which data to purge based on rules is accurate. [0]

[0] https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/060_forget.html#remo...

Re: Backups Aren't Simple

#39

Post by cortesoft »

snizovtsev wrote: post #30

I'm polishing my backup system right now, and found that `tar | zstd | gpg` plus a small vibe-coded wrapper is pretty much all I need. GNU tar has its own incremental index via `--listed-incremental=FILE`. Unlike Borg or Restic, which have their own more complicated repository formats, this leaves me with just one additional file (the `.snar`) alongside a dumb, portable full-disk tar archive. The nice part is that, u…

The problem with using glacier for backups is it's hard to run restore exercises, and without restore exercises, a backup is pretty dangerous

Re: Backups Aren't Simple

#40

Post by cyberax »

Gigachad wrote: post #36
publlus_enigma wrote: post #20

There are four times in my life I have suffered regrettable data loss incidents. The first was when the telephone pole outside our house was struck directly by lightning. Not only was it the loudest thing I have ever heard, the current surged through the telephone line, into the internal fax modem, and fries everything within its vicinity. I was 10. I did have backuos, but only only floppy and they didn't cover every…

>I've been weary of using rewritable media for some time now as a consequence I briefly considered using bluray disks as a backup for my photos and other critical docs. But getting a decent bluray burner seems not so easy these days with most production winding down. Next best thing looks like the "object lock" feature on object store services that prevents deleting objects for a certain time.

I bought a tape library for my backups, but that's probably an overkill.

On the other hand, LTO-5 drives are now pretty affordable. And each tape cartridge holds around 2Tb of data for about $20.

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