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What is your backup strategy? - Page 2
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What is your backup strategy?

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  • duply

  • emgemg Veteran

    @Awmusic12635 said:
    I use carbon copy cloner for backing up my mac via a full incremental disk image.

    By the way, when Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) runs, it uses rsync.

    Here is my personal backup strategy. In case it isn't obvious, I run a mostly Mac shop at home. We run Mac, Windows, Linux, and several other OSs. The non-Mac OSs run mostly in virtual machines.

    TIME MACHINE:

    At home, Apple's Time Machine backs up all of the family computers once an hour, asynchronously (each computer on its own hourly schedule).

    • A 2 TB Time Capsule backs up the family server and all but one family computer. It is an access point, but not the main router.

    • The family server has a 4 TB external drive which backs up my production iMac.

    • Children who live away from home have 1 TB "pocket drives" to run Time Machine. I doubt that they connect the drives as often as I would wish (at least once a day, to make sure their work is saved). When they are home, Time Machine alternates between the network Time Capsule and their drives, otherwise, whichever one is available, once an hour.

    Time Machine backups are very useful for recovering accidentally deleted files or files that have been corrupted (e.g., email). I have mostly good experiences recovering full system backups from Time Machine, but not always, and I certainly do not trust it 100% for full system recoveries, which is why I also keep disk image backups (see below). I have been able to recover full systems using a hybrid of the most recent disk image coupled with recently saved documents. When a disk crashes, I try Time Machine first, because it has the most recent backups.

    DISK IMAGES:

    At home, I keep full disk image files (encrypted) of all of the family computers. I update them when time is available and when the children come home, averaging every two or three months or so. I don't update them all every time. There are three identical drives, called Clone, Drive 1, and Drive 2. Clone is the master.

    When my out-of-state brother is coming to visit, I copy Clone to disk 1 or disk 2 (whichever is available) and swap drives with him. He takes the latest copy, and I update the one he just returned.

    HINTS:

    SPECIAL BOOT UTILITY DRIVE: I have a USB 3 flash drive with its own operating system, backup tools, recovery tools, "special" Unix commands and scripts, etc. I normally shut down the computers so that they are in a known good state. I boot them from the Backup/Recovery flash drive and clone the entire hard drive (and the Recovery partition) to a disk image file.

    FAST RAID DRIVE FOR INITIAL BACKUP: I use an ultra-fast "scratch" RAID drive to clone the computers. It takes a few hours each for the largest systems. I usually run them overnight. Sometimes I run them in the early morning hours for those children who stay up too late and then sleep in when they are home. :-)

    FAMILY SERVER DOES THE HEAVY LIFTING (COPYING): I use the family server to copy the disk image files to the Clone drive. It is out of the way and does not interfere with my regular work.

    OS VERSION LABEL AND MD5 INTEGRITY CHECK FILES: When I create disk image files, I also create two text files: One that labels which version of the operating system is installed on the system from which the disk image was taken. The second file contains an MD5 hash of the disk image file. This allows me to verify that the file copies remain altered before they gets sent offsite. The hashes are checked using the command line on the family server. Sometimes it takes a few hours to run an MD5 hash. That's okay. One thing - I have no idea what I would do in a recovery situation if the hash did not match the disk image file on the backup disk. I might look for another copy (on Clone, perhaps?) or just try to use it with the understanding that it may be corrupt.

    FILE FORMAT: I used to have CCC make "compressed, encrypted" .dmg disk image files. I discovered this morning that MD5 hashes of those files are not consistent. My hypothesis is that .dmg files may have a resource fork that changes if you copy the file from one system to another. My new plan is to create encrypted sparse bundle "files", then compress them. I found that md5 hashes ARE consistent with .zip files, which have only a data fork.

    PADDED DRIVE CASES FOR TRAVEL: Very handy: I have two "shock proof" padded cases with compartments for the drive, power adapter, and a USB 3 cable. The drive is all packed and ready to go for the swap. In case of emergency recovery, the power adapter and cable are kept with the drive. co2CREA makes many different padded cases for different drive types. Here is the one I use for my WD drives:

    http://www.amazon.com/co2CREA-Storage-Carrying-Western-External/dp/B0144143UI


    VPSs:

    I am ashamed to admit that I do not have an automated, well-evolved system for my VPSs. I still use tar, then cross copy (sftp) the backups between them. The VPSs are hosted by different VPS providers. Sometimes I download (sftp) a VPS backup to my home computer.

    I hope this helps someone. It felt good to document the process.

  • Use rrsync to rsync your most important config and public(or whatever you do) files to your home servers behind nat. No need for chroot, which never worked for me properly.

    https://www.guyrutenberg.com/2014/01/14/restricting-ssh-access-to-rsync/ and for my comment http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/1429106/#Comment_1429106

    emg said: I am ashamed to admit that I do not have an automated, well-evolved system for my VPSs. I still use tar, then cross copy (sftp) the backups between them. The VPSs are hosted by different VPS providers. Sometimes I download (sftp) a VPS backup to my home computer.

    I hope this helps someone. It felt good to document the process.

  • Backup is for pussys. No risk no fun

  • GM2015GM2015 Member
    edited December 2015

    Felines have 9 lives. Do you think they care about backups? You got it the wrong way around this time, Swan.

    edit: typo

    Sven said: Backup is for pussys. No risk no fun

  • Make backups of my code and websites every 3 hours (7zipped), and upload them to Amazon Cloud Drive ($5 for a year, Black Friday special)

  • theroyalstudent said: Make backups of my code and websites every 3 hours (7zipped), and upload them to Amazon Cloud Drive ($5 for a year, Black Friday special)

    And is it automated?

  • @theroyalstudent said:
    Make backups of my code and websites every 3 hours (7zipped), and upload them to Amazon Cloud Drive ($5 for a year, Black Friday special)

    +GPG

  • @srvrpro said:
    And is it automated?

    Cronjob to the rescue! Actually, I haven't tried to add this as a cronjob, but I have the commands. Probably will work.

    There is a guide to mount it on Ubuntu.
    (will link if you need it, at work now)

    @Crab said:
    GPG

    resource-intensive

    lmao, get my LES suspended? pretty sure it will cause crazy I/O and CPU usage...

  • Depends how much you need to backup...

    I've got a few websites, DBs, SVN and a few other small bits conf files and scripts going off to a small VPS running Dropbox and also rclone's every X amount of time to Google Drive.

    All in all its around 20-30GB in total..

  • @theroyalstudent said:
    lmao, get my LES suspended? pretty sure it will cause crazy I/O and CPU usage...

    It just depends on how much data you need to encrypt. Websites + code 7zipped doesn't sound like gigabytes and gigabytes.

    Compression makes GPG slow since it is enabled by default. Turn it off and it will be significantly faster.

  • @Crab said:
    Compression makes GPG slow since it is enabled by default. Turn it off and it will be significantly faster.

    Hundreds of megabytes... Well, I gotta compress, uploading file by file will take too long anyway.

    Probably just gonna do a MD5/SHA1 hash and upload it along.

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