# How many backups do you own?



## fossala (Jan 7, 2011)

After re-installing my PC FreeBSD (after a little time with OpenBSD). I formated my backup with All my music and videos on. Today I bought a new 2TB external to keep well away from my PC in case I am that stupid again. How many backups do you guys have and how many do you think is reasonable?


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## vermaden (Jan 7, 2011)

I would say, does not matter how many backups do You have at a single box, cause when that box fails, they all 'die'.

If something is valuable to You, then keep more then 1-2 copies of its backup, for example:
1. laptop
2. NAS
3. pendrive
4. external 'hosting' sollution (like dropbox)

Of course it gets more trouble if the size is large, for example if You would have 2TB of very valuable data, in that case, I keep one copy of that data on RAID1/RAID5 (generally RAID with some redundancy level) and another one on external USB hard disk.


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## oliverh (Jan 7, 2011)

At home I mirror every harddrive and store mission critical data on tape.


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## Pushrod (Jan 7, 2011)

I mirror my home directory, and I back it up along with my code and web stuff every night to a separate hard drive. The code and web stuff are synced to my "production" web server very often, so there it is well protected. The home directory is also burned to DVD approximately every two weeks, and given to a friend. I am considering putting it on the production web server, encrypted of course.

For things like TV shows, I keep lists of the files which contain info like size and mtime, so that if I lose any of it, I at least know _what_ I lost. It's not worth the cost to back up 4TB worth of TV shows though.

My web server also backs up to my main machine with rsync. There are 5 copies of it. This is mainly to rapidly re-deploy if ever there was a problem.

My firewall does full dumps every couple of nights. There is not really any sensitive data other than a few VPN keys and stuff. The dumps are mainly for rapid re-deployment, just like the web server.

My Windows Vista desktop computer gets knocked down once a month to clone the drive. This way, if I have an irrecoverable problem, I can roll back to a copy that is at most a month old. Nothing critical is stored on the machine. I only have a backup so that I don't have to waste time re-installing from the beginning.


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## phoenix (Jan 7, 2011)

Work:

6 months of daily snapshots
3 months of weekly snapshots
3+ months montly snapshots (goal is 18 months, but it depends on disk space)
replicated off-site (all the way across town)

Home:

6-8 weeks daily snapshots
burn critical data files to DVD every other month or so, stored in a different part of the house, but easily accessible if we have to leave in a rush


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## graudeejs (Jan 8, 2011)

Ok my desktop I keep:
* hourly snapshots for 3 days
* and when I boot PC, I make snapshot and keep it for 7 days


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## dennylin93 (Jan 8, 2011)

For servers I have daily snapshots that will be kept for at least 2~3 years.

For my desktop, well... I don't do backups as I don't have an extra hard disk for storing backups. I really should change this though.


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## rusty (Jan 8, 2011)

Hourly|Daily|Weekly|Monthly snapshots, Critical files are backed up daily on seperate internal drive, an external drive and kept as long as I feel necessary, 
I also do daily offsite backups of critical files using sysutils/tarsnap.


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## da1 (Jan 8, 2011)

Work:
- depending on the customer from daily backups to monthly or yearly backups, kept in multiple versions (from 2 to 30 usually) for 30 days to 10 years. All data is kept in 2 locations (more than 50 km apart) - everything is stored on tapes. Each location has it's own power grid, internet access line and backup generators plus a hard link to the other location.

2nd job:
- daily snapshots kept on a raid1 disks aray for 30 days synced with another machine with the same disk subsystem ~2km away from each other (same city)

home:
- 2x raid1 setups but no backups


 ... but it really comes down to what YOU or your customer needs and the financial resources you get access to.


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## fossala (Jan 8, 2011)

I now have my data back on my PC, externel 2tb and my brother has let me use NTP on his PC for important files.


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## Pushrod (Jan 8, 2011)

I don't consider RAID to be a backup. It does not protect against certain types of data loss, such as accidental deleting or modifying of files. I often find that those are the most common forms of data loss.


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## wblock@ (Jan 8, 2011)

Snapshots are mentioned without being specific.  Are those filesystem-based snapshots with mksnap_ffs(8) or ZFS, rsync(8) or some rsync-based tool like sysutils/dirvish, or something else?


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## graudeejs (Jan 8, 2011)

*zfSnap*shots in my case


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## rusty (Jan 8, 2011)

sysutils/freebsd-snapshot for UFS + ZFS here.


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## nekoexmachina (Jan 9, 2011)

> I formated my backup with All my music and videos on.


Dont see any point for backing up that stuff.
well, just in case if its yours music and videos created by you 

at home - backing up only dotfiles (every change) and all the im/mail/whatever history (i consider that kind of very important) on weekly basis. at work - im not a sysadm, and there are backups ran not by me: dunno how


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## phoenix (Jan 10, 2011)

wblock said:
			
		

> Snapshots are mentioned without being specific.  Are those filesystem-based snapshots with mksnap_ffs(8) or ZFS, rsync(8) or some rsync-based tool like sysutils/dirvish, or something else?



Does it really matter?    So long as the data in the snapshots are available for restoring data from.

In my case, though, it's all ZFS.


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## jalla (Jan 10, 2011)

wblock said:
			
		

> Snapshots are mentioned without being specific.  Are those filesystem-based snapshots with mksnap_ffs(8) or ZFS, rsync(8) or some rsync-based tool like sysutils/dirvish, or something else?



Don't rely on snapshots exclusively. When you have a diskcrash (and eventually you will) the snapshots go with it.

My backup plan is as follows
Do a number of snapshots during the day and keep them for about a week.
Nightly rsync of data areas including /etc, /var, /usr/local, ++ to a backupserver
Occasional dumps of system partitions to disk on the backupserver 
Occational backups of personal/important stuff to dvds stored outside my house


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## vdvluc (Jan 17, 2011)

After losing a few GBs of personal stuff a few years ago (learning the hard way ), i now have two backups. One backup on the local desktop (second HDD) and one on the network share.


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