On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 05:54:06PM +0000, Glenn English wrote: > On Mon, Mar 13, 2017 at 12:38 PM, Dan Purgert <d...@djph.net> wrote: > > David Christensen wrote: > >> On 03/11/2017 07:10 AM, Richard Owlett wrote: > >>> I've vague ideas of what backup pattern(s) I might follow. > >>> I'm looking for reading materials that might trigger "I hadn't thought > >>> of that" moments. > >>> > >>> Suggestions? > > I didn't see anybody talk about incremental backup (the backup > consists of current versions as well as earlier ones -- often earlier > work can replace erroneous or lost current work. Or work you don't > notice is gone for a few days.). There are 2 I know of, and one (and > probably many more) that may do that:
Having been there and done that, I can assure you that having a live snapshot system -- rsnapshot or btrfs/zfs native tools -- is more fun and less work for everyone. As a bonus, they can all send snapshots to remote systems or detachable media. > It backs up to a single disk. > It's GUI is kind of cutesy and a bit hard to use. > It's Mac only. > Macs change every few minutes. But I've been using it since it came > out (one of the Leopards), and it's not changed, AFAIK. On Macs, this is the way to go. But! You don't need to back up to a single disk. You can back up to a Linux system running AppleTalk, and those volumes can sit on RAID or ZFS or whatever you want. Recommended. [Amanda] > It can be configured to use many different pieces of medium. > It writes to tape or disk. I don't know if it does cloud. You can pretend a remote server is a set of disks. I wouldn't. > I've been using Amanda with tape for over a decade. No probs. Backing > up and recovering. I've never had to do a bare metal restore, though. > Nor have I ever tried to recover from one of its tarballs. Not much fun. Especially compared to self-service or nearly self-service from snapshots. > I've been on Amanda and tape from the beginning, back in the dark > ages, but I suspect it'd be happy to write to a handful of large(ish) > thumb drives. Another way of getting an incremental backup is to > mirror an entire system every day to a different device from a > collection of removable media (like thumb drives). That'd be a problem > for the likes of Google or Amazon, but might work well for a small > system. Thumb drives are terribly unreliable, but cheapish. Treat them like tapes and never write over them, and assume that some percentage will just die. -dsr-
