Making copies of data so that the copies may be used to restore the original after a data loss event, or for historical retention.
Questions tagged [backup]
3916 questions
127
votes
14 answers
Why is RAID not a backup?
When someone mentions RAID in a conversation about backups, invariably someone declares that "RAID is not a backup."
Sure, for striping, that's true. But what's the difference between redundancy and a backup?
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jldugger
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121
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GIT as a backup tool
On a server, install git
cd /
git init
git add .
git commit -a -m "Yes, this is server"
Then get /.git/ to point to a network drive (SAN, NFS, Samba whatever) or different disk. Use a cron job every hour/day etc. to update the changes. The .git…
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Smudge
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86
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8 answers
How to backup 20+TB of data?
We have a NAS server at the company I work for that is being used for storing photography sessions. Each session is approximately 100gb. Over the last couple of years this server has accumulated 10+ TB of data, and we are increasing the amount of…
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Jesus Fidalgo
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80
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11 answers
protocol version mismatch -- is your shell clean?
When following the instructions to do rsync backups given here: http://troy.jdmz.net/rsync/index.html
I get the error "protocol version mismatch -- is your shell clean?"
I read somewhere that I needed to silence the prompt (PS1="") and motd…
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rfreytag
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77
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3 answers
How to keep the full path with rsync?
When backing up with rsync, How do I keep the full directory structure?
For example, the remote server is saturn, and I want to backup saturn's /home/udi/files/pictures to a local directory named backup.
I want to have (locally)…
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Adam Matan
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51
votes
3 answers
Can I make rsync output only the summary?
I use rsync to backup a directory which is very big, containing many sub-directories and files, so I don't want to see the "incremental file list". I just want to know the summary in the end. If I use the argument -q, nothing is output at all. Can I…
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horsley
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50
votes
6 answers
How do I back up an AWS S3 Bucket without versioning the source bucket
Is there any way to recover from accidental deletions of an Amazon S3 Bucket?
We've got critical info in our buckets and I need to mitigate the risk of accidental or malicious deletions of the bucket itself.
I know I can sync the entire bucket…
Nikhil Gupte
49
votes
14 answers
Linux - What directories should I exclude when backing up a server?
I'm backing up a Linux server and storing it on another server.
I began with a simple
rsync -aPh --del server.example.com:/ /mnt/backup
Then someone pointed out that I shouldn't back up /proc, since you don't want to restore the /proc of one…
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Amandasaurus
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48
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5 answers
Confidential Documentation and the role of the Sysadmin
I've got another interesting one.
I'm about to backup and reinstall the HR Administrator's PC. I suspect that the fastest way to do this is to use the Windows 7 Transfer tool, and create a backup of the entire Users and Settings profiles on the…
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Tom O'Connor
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46
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6 answers
How to backup GPG?
What are the critical files I need to backup from GPG? I guess my private key would qualify of course, but what else?
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jldupont
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46
votes
3 answers
Rsync to AWS S3 bucket
For a server I am hosting a website on I want to backup the data and settings to an S3 bucket. I found out that you can't directly use rsync to backup to an S3 bucket. Is there another way to achieve the following rsync command to backup the data to…
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Bart Bergmans
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45
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2 answers
Prevent the possiblity of writing data to an unmounted mount point directory
I have an Ubuntu server where I'm automounting an external hard drive each boot.
To do this, I've created an empty folder on the root partition, and the drive gets mounted "inside" this folder.
However, what if I perform a backup to this path when…
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LonnieBest
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Does an unplugged hard drive used for data archival deteriorate?
If I were to archive data on a hard drive, unplug it, and set it on a (not dusty, temperature-controlled) shelf somewhere, would that drive deteriorate much?
How does the data retention of an unplugged hard drive compare to tapes?
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Jim Hunziker
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1 answer
What exactly will --delete-excluded do for rsync?
I use rsync with great pleasure for backing up my servers, although I do have a question about the --delete-excluded parameter.
/usr/bin/rsync -a --delete --numeric-ids --relative --delete-excluded --rsh=/usr/bin/ssh root@server01:/etc…
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ujjain
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41
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6 answers
SQL Server (2005/2008): Does full backup truncate the log in full recovery mode
I've just read through a lot of MSDN documentation and I think I understand the different recovery models and the concept of a backup chain. I still have one question:
Does a full database backup truncate the transaction log (using full recovery…
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Heinzi
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