How many backups are enough?
Caramba,
I must admit that I am obsessed. By @jarlands sexy baby butt and backups. Let's leave the @jarland obsession aside for a moment and talk about my second problem. Since I lost severaly years worth of digital life by not having backups (15 years ago), I became a bit crazy about that topic. All of my data exists at least 5 times. This is quite an expensive thing (approx. 3 TB data) and I begin to rethink my strategy.
Therefore I need your advice: Would you agree on two backups of the original data being enough? We all know that shit can hit the fan badly and you lose your original data at the same time as the backup servers are crashing. But those extreme events aside - What is your stance on the number of backups that one needs before sleeping safe and sound?
Thanks for helping me during this difficult time of my life. Your opinion is very much appreciated!
- None144 votes
- 119.44%
- 243.75%
- 321.53%
- 4 or more15.28%
Comments
Important stuff can have a dozen remote copies (personal photos/videos, business documents, tax stuff, etc), but things that are easily replaceable only have a local backup for fault tolerance (iTunes library, etc).
2 copies of the original should be fine. While you've had the 5 copies, how many times have you completely lost a copy?
Since a while now, in most of my production servers I use 2 full openvz or kvm backups of the entire virtualized server (I host them on my dedis) and a full backup of the sites (files + db). Each of the backup is being transferred in a different server, so, there are at least 3 backup servers. Virt servers are being backed up once a day (different times in each backup server). For some cases, I use a weekly, a 15/day and a monthly backup copy of each virt server. I also download in my pc a backup every second month.
In less critical setups, I have one off-site backup and one in the same server.
Not a single time in 15 years... ;-) That's the crazy thing: You never seem to lose data when you have backups. It just happens without backups...
I backup all my stuff to a storage vps (dr server in tx) and back that up to a dedicated server in France.
A backup isn't a backup until you've tested a restore. Too many fail on restore and are thus no backup at all.
As of me, just once! I lost a mail server recently, during the Inception Hosting Miami location failure! I moved there one of my mail servers a month ago before the incident and I didn't had the time to prepare my backup strategy for this server... I restored 3 year's emails from the old backups, but I lost lot of mails for the month I used the new server (luckily, I forward mails from important sources automatically to a live.com address, so it was a minor "disaster").
This was an alert for me: when you move things, the backup strategy comes immediately or "Murphy's Law" will occur!
Part of my obsession is, of course, to check my backups for integrity once a week. I run one big server just for that. It's really a tiring obsession...
I can't select "None"?
Probably part of the beauty of Vanilla... I cannot recreate or edit the poll, so people with no backups will not be able to vote then, sorry for that!
I guess I have to create a backup plan then...
And yes, of course I'm joking :-)
My backups:
1x local removable drive
2x local servers (a FreeBSD box with ZFS and a Debian box)
1x remote
1x local external hdd
When it is a matter of backups concerning my clients I try to retain about 5 backups.
It depends on where (and how) they are backed up and if they are completely independent
Depends . In a web I make some tweaks I use linode backup ($2.5/mo) + off site vps dime.
Personal stuff:
1. G drive
2. Drive in Docking station
3. Hubic
4. Dropbox
Some of important business docs are replicated 5 times. Here and there.
Personal files only two times.
I use 1 real time backup (rsync 3 minutes + mysql master slave) and 2 frozen archives (daily file and hourly db)
2 online and 1 offline backup is plenty. I think Google does 3 online, 2 offline copies.
I follow the same strategy, two online backups in different locations with different hosts, and then one offline backup on my trusty external hard drive.
I'd have to say it depends on how important data is. For some non-critical data, I set up RAID 1, shrug, and call it "backup." One the other hand, some data of my data I keep backups on four different servers and on a flash drive in a safety deposit box. It's expensive to keep ultra-redundant backups for all your stuff.
For a lot of my personal but non-confidential stuff, like photos and videos, I consider three enough, a simple cloud storage solution like an unlimited Google Drive + a storage server + local copy. Like some kind of dinosaur, sometimes I print them out and frame them.
My 1.1tb personal photos have 4 copies. Local drive,NAS, onederive, amazon cloud.
I go overboard with my backups:
@kujoe add backblaze to the mix!
How much data we talking about in this setup?
I considered them but the network speed was extremely slow (maxed out at 1.02Mbps on a 1Gbps port).
Mine usually uploads at 7Mbps at home. On speedtest.net I get upload 10Mbps. So pretty close.
I only realistically backup about 100GB of important data using this method. Everything else is only backed up 2 times locally and twice off-site.
@kujoe Care to share the server providers you trust for backups?
Online.net and Kimsufi are the 2 servers I use. The VPS is hosted on my own server.
You will never have enough backups, the more backups you have the better it will be because you never know what can happen until it happens and then its too late.