Backup Solutions

[Robert Brockway]

On Fri, 31 Aug 2007, Kevin Cozens wrote:

> Robert Brockway wrote:
>> I normally do level 0 backups monthly (aka full backups), level 2 each 
>> Monday rising to level 8 on the following Sunday.
>
> At least 9 levels of backup??
>
> You have your full backup and your incremental backup and one should follow a 
> schedule as to when each is done. How does one arrive at so many backup 
> levels? Do the other levels include scheduling information?

How to arrange dump levels is a topic that sysadmins have been debating 
for decades.  There is even an approach based on the "Tower of Hanoi" 
puzzle (referred to in the dump(1) man page on Linux last time I checked).

I use this many levels deliberately as a trade off between backup and 
recovery.

Backups are common, restoration uncommon and disaster recovery is 
hopefully rare.  Thus it made sense to me to optimise towards backups 
since they are the most common operation.

By using so many levels I reduce the time and storage that backups take at 
the expense of longer restorations and disaster recoveries.  I have deemed 
this to be a good trade off.  Using Towers of Hanoi and deleting the 
redundant logs may be more efficient and one day I may go that route.

Cheers,

Rob

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"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine..."
 	-- RFC 1925 "The Twelve Networking Truths"
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