Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!


How many backups are enough? - Page 2
New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.

All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.

How many backups are enough?

2

Comments

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran
    edited March 2016

    KuJoe said: I go overboard with my backups:

    People who keep visios of their home systems and networks...well, I think I've just fallen in love.

    image

  • SadySady Member

    @KuJoe said:
    I go overboard with my backups:

    Curios of how you have a USB drive on an offsite virtual server?

  • @Sady said:
    Curios of how you have a USB drive on an offsite virtual server?

    Colocation and USB passthrough?

    Thanked by 1KuJoe
  • SadySady Member

    @BradND said:

    Might be the reason that I was on LET with virtual server of $7.

  • IshaqIshaq Member

    Amitz said: I cannot recreate or edit the poll

    You can delete the poll and create a new one but you lose the data (pun intended). :)

    As for my opinion on backups, I think twice offsite is plenty especially if it's in different countries as it's highly unlikely that the original server as well as 2 others in different countries will have data corruption/failure or go offline at the same time.

    Thanked by 1Amitz
  • DewlanceVPSDewlanceVPS Member, Patron Provider

    Weekly, Monthly and daily backup is better option but also take yearly backup on your local PC. ;P

  • chipchip Member

    I do daily backups nightly to one offsite location (only personal stuff)

  • frankfrank Member

    2 main backups (one local at a machine I can physically touch) and '1' other at various other machines depending on the type of data. More than that is just redundant if you are doing it right.

    On this note anyone found any good new backup solutions? I had started to test out Duplicati before the Easter holidays as I am after a good web front end for my local backup machine, but not tested it out on a restore yet so don't know whether it truly works or not :)

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    I backup as follows:

    • All my VPSes and shared accounts go to BuyVM storage
    • They're also backed up to an Azure VM
    • And finally I backup to home, though not with the same frequency

    I used to pull from a central server, but grew nervous about having a single box with lots of ssh keys. So now I push:

    • VPS creates a local stage .tar.gz of everything I want to backup, then encrypts and sftps to the backup server. I know best practice is "backup every file on the system" but for VPSes I am pretty comfortable I know what I need to backup so I have a list of top-level directories.
    • on the backup server, the backup user (different for each VPS of course) is chrooted and can only run sftp (not a general shell)
    • backup server changes files to read-only after 5 minutes

    The idea is that if the backup server is compromised, there's nothing to get (everything is encrypted, without a key). If a client is compromised, you can't destroy the backups also because the files are RO.

    And of course, all the usual security around these systems.

    Thanked by 4Amitz bersy K4Y5 madtbh
  • since we're here...what is the cheapest vps service or backup services that give a lot of space to save data? cpu and ram are basically non important

  • KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep

    @Sady said:
    Curios of how you have a USB drive on an offsite virtual server?

    @BradND is sorta correct. The VPS is on a server I own and I have a 1TB laptop drive connected to the server internally that I backup the VPSs to. Once the server is in a new data center (next week) I'll backup the VPSs over NFS also.

  • (Disclaimer: All links I'm posting are tracked affiliate links, whenever the provider has an affiliate program. The following post may or may not contain such links)

    Versioning is as important as backup. Or maybe more.

    Thanked by 1KuJoe
  • howardsl2howardsl2 Member
    edited March 2016

    I set up a shared SSHFS folder across all servers. For a step-by-step tutorial, see my blog in signature.

    A nightly cron job backs up important data on each server to the SSHFS folder, which is then rsync'ed to "storage" servers and finally archived using rsnapshot on a fixed schedule.

  • NeoonNeoon Community Contributor, Veteran

    42.

  • @Amitz, I write down/print important photos out and store them in a nice, comfy safe :)

    No chance of accidentally being "deleted," failing to restore backups, or crashing. I even store my Bitcoin private key there :p

  • BradBrad Member

    @sandro said:
    since we're here...what is the cheapest vps service or backup services that give a lot of space to save data? cpu and ram are basically non important

    Probably time4vps.

  • Anyone willing to share their backup scripts?

  • I use MEGA.nz with createmega.xyz to create unlimited free backups

  • msg7086msg7086 Member
    edited March 2016

    One very important thing is to always keep a copy offline. It's to protect your data from ransomware or stupid sync software (such as BTSync who sometimes wipes your data from all your sync'd copies).

    And 3TB seems to be not that much. You can burn copies of BD-R with those immutable original files encrypted, and send them to your family's / close friends' house, or your office.

  • KrisKris Member

    4 copies. 3 off-site in different countries, 1 rotating decoy set & 1 copy on an air gapped machine.

  • @maxmitch said:

    I use MEGA.nz with createmega.xyz to create unlimited free backups

    how do you organize or access them? I mean you have multiple 50GB account accessible via browser only?

  • @sandro said:
    maxmitch said:
    how do you organize or access them? I mean you have multiple 50GB account accessible via browser only?

    megatools - A godsend.

    Thanked by 1netomx
  • No backups, just Puppet.

  • emgemg Veteran

    I have three types of backups:

    • A rotating set of 3 hard drives (6 Gbytes each): One is the master, which is kept up-to-date. The other two are a rotating offsite pair, which are periodically swapped. These drives hold a variety of full system images, virtual machines, and more.

    • An ongoing automatic backup (Apple Time Machine). It backs up hourly. It is the full recovery option of first resort, as well as providing lost work, simple file level recovery.

    • Archives: Eventually I move very old systems, obsolete files, and historical backups onto older unused drives. It is understood that there is a risk that this data may eventually be lost, which is okay. (Anything important is recorded on the redundant backups, above.) To my surprise, a few days ago I got a request to recover a very old file. I found it quickly and provided it. It always feels good when such a system works as planned.

    Other useful information:

    • All backups are encrypted. The encryption keys are stored in multiple secure locations, away from the backups themselves.

    • I have two ultra fast RAID drives, which serve as scratch drives to image full systems quickly. After imaging a system, I attach the RAID drive to a server, and use it to copy the image to the "master" drive described at the top of this post. I also use the server to clone the master to the current rotating backup. That process can take a day or two, but there is no hurry.

    I know it sounds complicated, but it doesn't take much effort, and has saved my behind more than a few times over the years.

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    msg7086 said: You can burn copies of BD-R with those immutable original files encrypted, and send them to your family's / close friends' house, or your office.

    Home-burnt optical media really doesn't stand the test of time, from what I've read. It's definitely not as durable as something pressed in a factory.

  • AmitzAmitz Member
    edited March 2016

    Okay, thank you all very much for giving insight in your strategy!

    I have switched to the following backup scheme:

    1 x original data
    2 x backups on remote servers (in different countries)
    3 x backups on local storage devices (in different households)

    all daily and with a retention of 60 days (snapshots), while testing the backups for integrity once every week.

    I guess this should be enough and saves me 2-3 servers and their monthly costs.

  • I always consider below methods for backing up data files:

    1. Full backup: Take backup of the whole data.
    2. Incremental backup: Files and folders that have been modified or created after the former backup.
  • K4Y5K4Y5 Member

    @GunjanTripathi said:
    I always consider below methods for backing up data files:

    1. Full backup: Take backup of the whole data.
    2. Incremental backup: Files and folders that have been modified or created after the former backup.

  • 1 local backup, 2 cloud backups. Everything is archived, encrypted and splitted. I even have 2 PAR files for the archive for any case

  • Just recently had a database crash and we had to rebuild it since we had no backup.

    Just one table wasn't recoverable and it wasn't an important one.

    By that experience, zero backups are enough.

    Thanked by 2madtbh TheKiller
Sign In or Register to comment.