[ale] Versioned backups are simple now.

[Derek Atkins]

DJ-Pfulio via Ale <ale at ale.org> writes:

> Don't forget that ZFS actually validates what was sent to be written was
> actually written to the disk.

Yep.

> If a file is corrupted and you don't realize it within the backup
> versions, either the versions retained aren't long enough or the file
> isn't THAT important.  Of course, regulatory mandates can alter this.
>
> For a desktop, 60 days of versioned backups has been sufficient.
> For higher risk systems, 180 days might be needed. If you like monthly
> or yearly archives, that is easy. It is just storage space.
>
> For off-site archives, rsync the rdiff-backup dirs to somewhere you trust.
>
> But there are lots of ways to slice this sashimi.	

I do nightly backups of all my servers by rdiff-backup.

They are stored in an EncFS encrypted file system using FreeNAS/NFS/ZFS
as the backing-store.

I plan to do (but have not, yet, set up) frequent backups of the ZFS
file system to the cloud.

On another point -- I recently upgraded several of my servers from
Fedora 25 to Fedora 29 -- and my backup time decreased by a few hours!
Could newer python be that much faster?  (I would suspect yes).   Note
that I did not upgrade the version on the backup server, yet (which is
even older)...

-derek
-- 
       Derek Atkins                 617-623-3745
       derek at ihtfp.com             www.ihtfp.com
       Computer and Internet Security Consultant