Backups are important to you know
Sun 23 November 2014
After years of being a systems administrator, the one thing I remember is the look on the face of somebody thats asks for a data recovery on a system where they have lost all the family photos the wedding videos. Its not the face when they ask the questions its the homer simpson movement when you ask if they make backups!
Dooooh!
Backups can be as simple or as complex as you want, but I feel the best way for most people to start with backups is to have a system that runs in the background backing up everything without intervention. And preferably on a outside server somewhere.
I have been using this service for my own offsite backup for a while now and it is for the cost a good insurance against data loss.
If you just need to be safe this is a good product to start you off.
The next thing is to make sure you archive everything to at least 1 external hard disk, I say one but I always have 2 copies local on two separate disks.
Another option is dropbox, in this situation I would always have a local disk and a copy on dropbox, rsync can be used here to make sure everything is in sync and updated.
For servers Bacula is most definitely the way to go…. this is the best product for any serious business it enables enterprise quality backups and restores on many formats. Tapes DVDs disks and of course the cloud. You imagination can run wild here. All you need is to setup the interesting configuration files ;)
I have run many systems over the years and for me it is:
Backblaze for home with a local copy on hard disk copied once a month. Office bacula and rsync to offsite locations