Show HN: Baxx – Unix-friendly backup service

Post by bloopernova » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 2:42 PM UTC

Groxx wrote: post #183

bloopernova wrote: post #28

(Alternative product recommendation, please downvote/remove if you feel that isn't appropriate) For Unix/Linux backups, may I suggest Borg Backup? It encrypts and does dedupe astonishingly well. It also works over SSH incredibly fast, and restores are via a mounted FUSE filesystem so they're easy to pick and choose what you need. It prunes really well too, and is a single executable so it's easy to distribute via Ans…

For bash scripting: have you seen shellcheck? It's a very solid first-pass for any script, and the codes it emits have excellent documentation: https://www.shellcheck.net/

Post by y4mi » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 5:14 PM UTC

bloopernova wrote: post #193

y4mi wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should make a habit of setting set -euo Pipefail if "${DEBUG:-false}”; then set -x; fi The -o Pipefail is irrelevant in this case, as you're not using any.. but better it's there in case you ever extend the script. As others have pointed out: readability comes right after correctness in shell script, do keeping it simple as you have done is always a good idea.

I hope you see this reply, I am sorry for it being so late: Do you have a link to a good explanation of why you'd set those? The "set -e" seems to indicate that the script would fail immediately if the borg backup job fails, which would prevent the Zabbix "send" command from alerting the monitoring system. Thank you for your feedback, it's given me more to learn and think about!

    1 #!/bin/bash
    2
    3 set -euo pipefail
    4 if ${DEBUG:-false}; then set -x; fi
    5
    6 function random_exitcode(){
    7         return $(( RANDOM % 5))
    8 }
    9
   10 function handle_error(){
   11   case "$?" in
   12     1)  echo "handling exitcode 1!";;
   13     2)  echo "handling exitcode 2!!";;
   14     3)  echo "handling exitcode 3!!!";;
   15     *)  echo "encountered unexpected exitcode: $?"; exit 2;;
   16   esac
   17 }
   18
   19 random_exitcode || handle_error

  random_exitcode || LAST_EXITCODE=$?
  case "${LAST_EXITCODE:=0}" in ...

Post by arendtio » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 12:09 AM UTC

ars wrote: post #132

arendtio wrote: post #109

Two reasons why I do not want to use the service in its current state (meant as constructive criticism): 1. If I would send my backups to some SASS there is no way I would do that without encryption. 2. I like to backup my filesystem and not just the files in it (to make sure I've got everything and make restoring easy). Currently, I just dd my block devices, but I am sure that could be optimized to not upload a comp…

> Currently, I just dd my block devices That's actually not a good idea at all. It's very fragile, the slightest problem and you may lose the entire backup. Silent corruption may get backed up for months and you won't notice until it's too late. Doing a restore means having space for the full file, just to restore a single small file. If you don't know when your file changed you may have to do that multiple times ins…

Post by dmd » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 8:12 PM UTC

prirun wrote: post #197

dmd wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're using Bacula, because in our case it's the only thing that works with our volume, and also works with tape (which is the only cost effective way we've found to archive multi petabyte datasets). But I'm not very happy about it, because it's insanely overcomplicated for no really good reason, and because of it being file-based.

Backblaze has done some cost comparisons between LTO and cloud storage: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/lto-versus-cloud-storage/ If you're interested, I'm doing experiments with another site with 500T to backup, where I added sampling and sharding to HashBackup (I'm the author). Sampling allows you to do faster simulated backups to determine the best backup parameters to use. In his case, we determine that a very lar…

Post by zulgan » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 9:57 PM UTC

quickthrower2 wrote: post #188

escaper wrote: post #34

I get that it's probably "trendy" to say you don't have or need a website but with it being so easy to create a static page, I'm failing to understand why you wouldn't just do that, which is already the bare minimum, if you care about your project and want to sell it?

Had he done that I doubt it would have done so well on HN. It’s a differentiation point from yet another bootstrap css SaaS with three tier pricing, faded monotone brand logos and circlular portrait photos of the “team”.