17.11 Backup Strategies

Original work by Lowell Gilbert.

The first requirement in devising a backup plan is to make sure that all of the following problems are covered:

• Disk failure

• Accidental file deletion

• Random file corruption

• Complete machine destruction (e.g. fire), including destruction of any on-site backups.

It is perfectly possible that some systems will be best served by having each of these problems covered by a completely different technique. Except for strictly personal systems with very low-value data, it is unlikely that one technique would cover all of them.

Some of the techniques in the toolbox are:

• Archives of the whole system, backed up onto permanent media offsite. This actually provides protection against all of the possible problems listed above, but is slow and inconvenient to restore from. You can keep copies of the backups onsite and/or online, but there will still be inconveniences in restoring files, especially for non-privileged users.

• Filesystem snapshots. This is really only helpful in the accidental file deletion scenario, but it can be very helpful in that case, and is quick and easy to deal with.

• Copies of whole filesystems and/or disks (e.g. periodic rsync(1) of the whole machine). This is generally most useful in networks with unique requirements. For general protection against disk failure, it is usually inferior to RAID. For restoring accidentally deleted files, it can be comparable to UFS snapshots, but that depends on your preferences.

• RAID. Minimizes or avoids downtime when a disk fails. At the expense of having to deal with disk failures more often (because you have more disks), albeit at a much lower urgency.

• Checking fingerprints of files. The mtree(8) utility is very useful for this. Although it is not a backup technique, it helps guarantee that you will notice when you need to resort to your backups. This is particularly important for offline backups, and should be checked periodically.

It is quite easy to come up with even more techniques, many of them variations on the ones listed above. Specialized requirements will usually lead to specialized techniques (for example, backing up a live database usually requires a method particular to the database software as an intermediate step). The important thing is to know what dangers you want to protect against, and how you will handle each.