this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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How often do you make a back up? (self.sysadmin)
submitted 11 months ago by InternetCitizen2 to c/sysadmin
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I was wondering how often does one choose to make and keep back ups. I know that “It depends on your business needs”, but that is rather vague and unsatisfying, so I was hoping to hear some heuristics from the community. Like say I had a workstation/desktop that is acting as a server at a shop (taking inventory / sales receipts) and would be using something like timeshift to keep snapshots. I feel like keeping two daily and a weekly would be alright for a store, since the two most recent would not be too old or something. I also feel like using the hourly snapshots would be too taxing on a CPU and might be using to much disk space.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Backup on different levels, one of my clients who I would say has similar ifrastructure uses following approach:

  • backup on the vm level - backing up snapshot of the entire virtualization guest - at least once a week, always before update/upgrade. These can be big - consider ZFS pool w/ compression and deduplication active - but that is also hw intesive. On the other hand, I don't think you need to keep more than last two successfull backups.
  • filesystem level - run rdiff-backup against the / of the filesystem several times a day. SInce it is essentially versioning, you are only backing up new changes. No zetabyte needed here, ext3/4 will do.
  • drop database somewhere ideally several times a day - even if there are no incidents, your developers will love you.

The recovery strategy is as follows:

  • pull the guest out of the last vm backup
  • sync up the files from last rdiff-backup run
  • discuss w/ the developer DB recovery - or just recover the last backup and hope for the best..