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How does everybody backup?

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Re: How does everybody backup?

#32

Post by sam »

f00bar wrote: post #25
brunnock wrote: post #8

I second the Rsync recommendation. I back up our servers every 15 minutes with it. In the event of a catastrophe, we will have lost 15 minutes worth of data, at most.

Have a look at rsnapshot (rsnapshot.org), a perl wrapper script over rsync. Supports *nix and incremental backups that roll over.

Yes, rsnapshot is excelent. The documentation is good too.

We also use gpg (gnupg.org) to encrypt our critical databases and code repository and send them to Amazon S3 every night. I started doing this after the last earthquake here in the bay area (which was centered near Freemont, where our colo is). I have tattooed the key to unencrypt them on my inner thigh.

Re: How does everybody backup?

#33

Post by edw519 »

eru wrote: post #24
edw519 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my system, anything that changes is in /bin. For a catastrophe, I would reinstall the OS and environment and then restore data from the thumb drive.

Interesting. Could you elaborate, please?

OK. I bet I'm the only one on this board using this technology...

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/u2/universe/

EVERYTHING is stored as data on the u2 database. All javascript, css, html, php, and mysql is generated from this data through custom builds. No need to backup anything except the source data and the custom programs used to generate everything else. And all of that is within the IBM/u2/bin directory.

Have a disaster? Restore the environment, restore the u2 database & code, and rebuild everything else. I designed it for the development leverage. The ease of disaster recovery is just a bonus.

Re: How does everybody backup?

#34

Post by bayareaguy »

edw519 wrote: post #33
eru wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Could you elaborate, please?

OK. I bet I'm the only one on this board using this technology... http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/u2/universe/ EVERYTHING is stored as data on the u2 database. All javascript, css, html, php, and mysql is generated from this data through custom builds. No need to backup anything except the source data and the custom programs used to generate everything else. And all of that is within the IBM/u2/bin directory. Ha…

You've picked well :-)

Re: How does everybody backup?

#35

Post by PStamatiou »

server wise i use a very simple script to dump an archive to S3. http://paulstamatiou.com/2007/07/29/how-to-bulletproof-serve...

but for personal computer files I manually put important files in an S3 bucket or two. not the most efficient but it works. I'm considering writing some rsync to S3 type of thing. regardless i love having my stuff online (and safe). my MBP doesn't have much other than essential apps and a few files i'm working on at the moment. most other things are online.

the only exception being media which i sync to an external drive manually every few months.

Re: How does everybody backup?

#38

Post by bbraun »

PStamatiou wrote: post #35

server wise i use a very simple script to dump an archive to S3. http://paulstamatiou.com/2007/07/29/how-to-bulletproof-serve... but for personal computer files I manually put important files in an S3 bucket or two. not the most efficient but it works. I'm considering writing some rsync to S3 type of thing. regardless i love having my stuff online (and safe). my MBP doesn't have much other than essential apps and a f…

You may be interested in Duplicity, which can do encrypted backups to S3: http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ Duplicity uses the rsync algorithm for data transfer as well.

For those creating archives, you may be interested in xar: http://code.google.com/p/xar/ It preserves all the metadata such as SELinux information, ACLs, EAs, etc. On Mac OS X, it preserves all that, the resource fork and finder metadata as well. Two options are particularly relevant to backups: --link-same makes identical file data into hardlinks, reducing space consumption both within the archive, and on disk when extracted. --coalesce-heap when files with identical data are encountered, the data is only stored once in the archive, reducing the size of the archive.

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