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Re: [LUG] Simple backup

 
On 25/11/19 21:22, Simon Avery wrote:
Hello again,
 
It's very very hard to user-proof backup/restore especially when they're
not under your thumb (i.e., at work) so the best advice I can give you
is to automate it entirely and have it monitored so you know if it's not
working. 

This is very much the nub of it and excellent guidance. Whatever service OP goes for, this is what it boils down to.

To expand slightly;

1. Reliable. (So... Keep it simple. Try and understand what's actually happening, don't rely on cloud magic or 
2. Automatic.  (Humans suck at remembering to do boring things. Computers are very good at it.)
3. Chatty when things go wrong, silent when things go right.  (Notify on error, not on success. Setup and forget - until you need to know)
4. (Optional) - Only what you actually care about. (This ties into #1, but don't back up everything. Newbie mistake. The performance, storage and time impacts make it more likely you'll get annoyed one day and turn them off. Then forget. Keep your important and unique stuff in as few a directories as you can, and back up those.)

Personally, I use about a dozen ways. From Gdrive, to rsync, to backuppc (which is excellent, but not really simple again), to samba, to live replication, to tar/gzip, to mysqldumps, and occasionally manually copying to hard drives on a caddy so I can offline them and shove them in a drawer. For the really important stuff, I offline it and shove it in a fireproof safe.)  It's worked for me so far, but anyone who knows anything about computers knows that you can never fully relax.  The stuff we do at work is a lot more comprehensive...

S



+1.

I'd slightly disagree with (3) - you sure want verbosity when things go wrong, but I'd still prefer a short status-line indication that Something Ran, and say how many files/updates it performs. That provides piece of mind that its actually working, instead of lulling you into a false sense of security when things *Aren't* as they should be *and/or* the reporting mechanism is broken... Remember the test is that you can receive a notification when something goes wrong, as much as telling you *what* went wrong .. (hopefully) ..

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