[CentOS] Backup Suggestion on C7

[J Martin Rushton]

Mark has asked me to forward this to the list:
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Subject: Re: [CentOS] Backup Suggestion on C7
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2016 17:09:41 -0400
From: m.roth at 5-cent.us
To: J Martin Rushton <martinrushton56 at btinternet.com>

Please forward to the CentOS list - my hosting provider claims they been
working with SORBS, but it's now been blocking me from posting for two
weeks....

J Martin Rushton wrote:
> I'm not a bacula expert, but have had 30+ years in the industry doing
> backups.  I'm a little concerned about what you are planning.  As I
> understand it you are going to be keeping just one copy of each machine
> on a disk attached to the server.  This will help if you loose the
> running disks (though it is hardly backup in depth), but what happens if
> you loose the server due to fire, flood, electrical problems, theft or
> even plain old dropping it?  In general you should aim for multiple
> backup copies; are you willing to bet the company's future on one
> untried copy?  You should ensure that the backup copies are held
> preferably off site, failing that in a separate building, or else in a
> secure fireproof strongbox.

To start, is the OP doing disaster recovery backups, or archive backups?
The difference is the former you only keep for a limited amount of time,
and the later forever.

If the former: first, you should not be backing up one server to its own
disks. The backup should reside on a different server. Secondly, consider
an offline backup. Here at work, we use a home-grown rsync solution (with
hard links), and typically save those for five weeks. We also back up the
backups to either offline disks (mounted in hot swap bays, and they reside
the rest of the time in a fire safe; for things that one fit on one disk,
they're backed up to a server in another building with a large RAID.

For the latter, which I have not been involved with, you should probably
have x weeks, then save the weeklies for x months, then the montlies for x
years. And *ALL* of that should be offsite.

       mark, hoping this gets through
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