[BBLISA] backups

[Edward Ned Harvey]

> From: bblisa-bounces at bblisa.org [mailto:bblisa-bounces at bblisa.org] On
> Behalf Of Ryan Pugatch
> 
> What backup solution do you use?
> 
> How much data are you backing up?
> 
> Are you sending the data off site?  How?  Disk, tape?

If it's not entirely impossible for you, I highly recommend ZFS.  I have our
primary file server, and everything else backs up onto it.  It uses ZFS Send
to a backup server, which then sends offsite across network, and to
removable disk, and to tape.  At any time, if the primary server were to
fail, I would only need to assign that IP address to the backup server, in
order for the backup to assume the role of primary.  Yes, it's overkill, but
that's the way I like backups.

The thing that's awesome about ZFS Send is that it natively knows which
blocks on disk have changed since the last snapshot, so it's as efficient as
possible for generating incremental backups.  No need to scan the filesystem
for changes or anything like that (which is time consuming.)  It cuts our
backup window down to something negligible (say, a few minutes every night,
which was formerly 10 hrs nightly when we were doing rsync, because rsync
needs to walk the tree scanning for changed items.)

Some people do what I'm doing, but make it even more frequent.  Like hourly,
or every 15 minutes.  Because there is no overhead to scan the filesystem,
why not just do it obsessively all the time.  I'm happy with daily snapshots
sent to all the backup destinations.

Our data is around 2T