Backups for Linux

stacksofplates

Uhhhh It's been a long while but I think backing up linux is something like:

sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=4k

That sounds like a fun time to manage.

MattSpeller

@johnhooks backups are easier when you have no data left to backup

stacksofplates

Uhhhh It's been a long while but I think backing up linux is something like:

sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=4k

edit: this is a joke, don't do the above - it's probably even the wrong syntax

Even the correct syntax.

MattSpeller

@johnhooks did I actually get it right? I've not used that in ... nearly a decade.

stacksofplates

@MattSpeller said:

@johnhooks did I actually get it right? I've not used that in ... nearly a decade.

Ha ya. Not too shabby.

scottalanmiller

With Linux it is becoming common to manage through Chef or Puppet and have little and possibly no data to back up at all.

dafyre

@scottalanmiller Only if you're not using the Linux box for a file server, lol.

scottalanmiller

@dafyre said:

@scottalanmiller Only if you're not using the Linux box for a file server, lol.

If you are, it is common to only back up the data, let Chef or Puppet rebuild everything but that part. The file server portion can be restored via Rsync or a tarball or other easy mechanism.

marcinozga

@johnhooks said:

@marcinozga said:

For Drupal, I use Backup & Migrate module with NodeSquirrel:
https://www.nodesquirrel.com/ - free up to 5GB

All my Linux servers are virtualized, and I use Veeam.
I have one VPS that I backup with Bacula.

Do you like bacula? I haven't had a reason to set all of that up yet to try it.

If I were to take the jump should I do bacula or bareos?

It's ok for my needs. I still run custom script to dump mysql databases, and then bacula does file level backup. It can be dead simple to set up, or it might confuse the hell out of you. And it's a backup tool designed for tapes originally - I think - but it works with disks. If you decide to try it, use Webmin to manage it, it will make your life much easier.
I've never used bareos, so I can't compare. Its webui looks nice, I can tell it's Bootstrap based.

stacksofplates

@scottalanmiller said:

@dafyre said:

@scottalanmiller Only if you're not using the Linux box for a file server, lol.

If you are, it is common to only back up the data, let Chef or Puppet rebuild everything but that part. The file server portion can be restored via Rsync or a tarball or other easy mechanism.

I kind of have the same thing without it. The data is on a separate virtual disk. If something ever terrible happens and I can't recover the root disk, I just restore from a snapshot (either a recent one or an exported one) of just the VM and then reattach the data drive, which has also has the incremental backups if needed.

WingCreative

Right now all my production Linux hosts are on VMs so I have snapshots of the backend infrastructure along with application-level backups of data as needed. Mostly these are EC2 instances running WordPress where I have a base AMI ready to go with offsite BackupBuddy backups. It's served me well in the few times I've had to use it - I can go from a launching an instance to all data recovered in about 15 minutes or less.

With that said, I'm really looking forward to seeing how Veeam's Linux backup works once it's released!