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Today is World Backup Day – a friendly reminder to backup and check restores

worldbackupday.com

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Re: Today is World Backup Day – a friendly reminder to backup and check restores

#41

Post by hugs »

amirmc wrote: post #40

Please also remember that a backup is only as good as the restore process. If you've never had cause to test that your restore process works as intended then you're still vulnerable. PS: I admit that while I keep backups, I've not once checked that I can actually restore (but I know I should). I suspect many people are the same.

This is why I make bootable backup copies of my laptop's internal hard drive to external USB drives. Right after the backup is done, I test it by booting from the USB drive to make sure everything worked. (I use Carbon Copy Cloner. I have no affiliation with them other than liking their product.)

Re: Today is World Backup Day – a friendly reminder to backup and check restores

#42

Post by Spooky23 »

throwaway7767 wrote: post #38
IgorPartola wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use ZFS. It works.

But, as with the old adage "RAID is not backup", don't forget that ZFS is not a backup either. ZFS has bugs like any other codebase, and metadata corruption will make your whole pool unrecoverable. RAID-Z and block checksums won't save you from that. I speak from personal experience with ZFS. Backups are important, no matter what filesystem you use.

ZFS is a good answer to the question "Do you do anything to check against corruption?"

If you're doing differential backups on external USB disks (generally of dubious reliability), you definately want some integrity checking. Bitrot happens!

Re: Today is World Backup Day – a friendly reminder to backup and check restores

#43

Post by zimpenfish »

GrumpySimon wrote: post #20
deanclatworthy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I considered the same thing. But when you are backing up several terabytes of photos and home movies collected over many years the cost of storing them on Glacier isn't as cheap as using the unlimited service of Crashplan or Backblaze ($10 a month vs $5-6 month). Furthermore, Crashplan and Backblaze don't charge you to retrieve your data unlike Glacier, which is where it gets very expensive.

Absolutely. After messing around with various combinations of rsync/ssh/unison/s3/glacier/etc for a few years, I bit the bullet and paid for Crashplan. It's cheap - the family plan is ~150 USD/year for up to ten computers, unlimited. It's a lifesaver. I've installed it on my parents/wifes/siblings computers and the piece of mind it gives me is immense - when I get the inevitable phone calls about the damn computer de…

I'd like to use the Crashplan Family option to cover everyone but since it's all shared and there's seemingly no way to silo the data per-computer, that's a total non-starter. Which is a shame because I'd love to give them my cash.

Re: Today is World Backup Day – a friendly reminder to backup and check restores

#44

Post by ryandrake »

Funny timing. Had a near-panic last night where I almost had to tell my wife I lost the last 2 years worth of photos because backups are stale. Fortunately, they were all found on an old laptop, so disaster averted.

I spent last night looking into off-site backup solutions, and haven't yet found one I would be willing to pay for. They all seem to require strange client software to work. Is there anything out there where I can set up an account and simply have cron rsync everything over every week? Why do I need a Java GUI (Crashplan) or some 3rd party python script (Glacier) to do a task that doesn't change week to week?

Re: Today is World Backup Day – a friendly reminder to backup and check restores

#45

Post by crdoconnor »

chimeracoder wrote: post #27

I wish that they included options for Linux too. What Linux backup tools do people use? Currently I'm making do with a bash script that's just a wrapper around rsync, but it'd be nice to have something a little more powerful, especially with the option to back up things to glacier, etc.

There are a lot:

http://skeptu.com/online-backup-service+has-client:linux-app...

Re: Today is World Backup Day – a friendly reminder to backup and check restores

#47

Post by driverdan »

chimeracoder wrote: post #27

I wish that they included options for Linux too. What Linux backup tools do people use? Currently I'm making do with a bash script that's just a wrapper around rsync, but it'd be nice to have something a little more powerful, especially with the option to back up things to glacier, etc.

CrashPlan. Works well on all major OSes but it does use a lot of memory since it's Java. You can use it to backup to their own online service or you can do peer-to-peer between systems with CP installed.

Re: Today is World Backup Day – a friendly reminder to backup and check restores

#48

Post by BitMastro »

chimeracoder wrote: post #27

I wish that they included options for Linux too. What Linux backup tools do people use? Currently I'm making do with a bash script that's just a wrapper around rsync, but it'd be nice to have something a little more powerful, especially with the option to back up things to glacier, etc.

backuppc, incremental backups, de-duplication, supports Windows/Linux with smb/ssh/nfs etc

Re: Today is World Backup Day – a friendly reminder to backup and check restores

#49

Post by flopska »

throwaway7767 wrote: post #38
IgorPartola wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use ZFS. It works.

But, as with the old adage "RAID is not backup", don't forget that ZFS is not a backup either. ZFS has bugs like any other codebase, and metadata corruption will make your whole pool unrecoverable. RAID-Z and block checksums won't save you from that. I speak from personal experience with ZFS. Backups are important, no matter what filesystem you use.

I'm using ZFS on my home server. The backups of my main system are created with the ubuntu desktop utility and written to the server via NFS. This means I have incremental backups and the backups themselves are protected from a hardware failure using raidz. A problem with this approach is the possibility to rm -rf /mnt/backup - that's why I only start and mount the server when I need it. It's not running 24/7.

Re: Today is World Backup Day – a friendly reminder to backup and check restores

#50

Post by otibom »

ryandrake wrote: post #44

Funny timing. Had a near-panic last night where I almost had to tell my wife I lost the last 2 years worth of photos because backups are stale. Fortunately, they were all found on an old laptop, so disaster averted. I spent last night looking into off-site backup solutions, and haven't yet found one I would be willing to pay for. They all seem to require strange client software to work. Is there anything out there wh…

https://backupsy.com/ ?
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