[wellylug] Rotating backups

[Dagan]

On Mon, 2012-04-30 at 07:12 +1200, Phil Donaldson wrote:
> Thanks for the suggestions guys.
> 
> I like the sound of the offsite diff backups.
> And I'm looking for a backup product - have tried custom scripts and
> they're too much work and hard to support.
> I guess I've avoided diff backups so far due to a fear of one piece of
> the diff failing and making my whole backup useless. Do tools like
> Bacula and duplicity prevent this?
> 
> To answer Duane's question, for now I need to backup files and a
> database from my file server.

 This is why differential are IMO better than incremental, because
you're not relying on a Monday-Thursday back-ups to restore Friday, you
need the last full back-up, and the last non-corrupt differential - two
back-ups as opposed to up to a fortnight of nightly incrementals.
 There are a lot less back-ups to have to worry about being corrupted.

 From my personal experience, Bacula has never lost a whole back-up,
though on that point, I would say it is a requirement to have a back-up
of Bacula itself - it stores the back-up catalogue in a database :)

 There are a number of support options for Bacula, I found the mailing
list very responsive.

 And if the worst happens, there is paid support for Bacula from the
creators of the software.

 And if you are still not sure, there are the companies I mentioned
earlier who you can talk to about managing it for you.

 Dagan