[GTALUG] Backups with Bacula

[Anthony de Boer]

Lennart Sorensen via talk wrote:
> My experience some years ago with 3 USB harddrives that were rotated
> weekly was that the disks didn't last long.  3.5" HDs do not like
> being moved a lot and frequently died.  Moving to tape was way way
> more reliable but certainly had a higher cost in terms of getting a
> tape drive and for recovery you might need another tape drive while a
> USB drive works with anything.

You tend to only need spinning rust nowadays for the largest datasets,
and I find that splitting archival from active filesystems helps.  The
archival stuff tends to be huge but write-only: media files and tarballs
and such get written and then left as-is for the life of the filesystem. 
That requires a much-less-frequent backup!  And that reduces the size of
the active filesystem plus any new archival files to the point it has a
chance of fitting onto flash.

Another way the world has changed is that sites are no longer such
islands connected by 56k modems and sneakernet; there's more chance of
being able to push a backup over fibre somewhere to a harddrive that's
already offsite and doesn't need to be moved further.  Having another
datacentre to rsync to is ideal, as I'm not sure how much you can trust
third-party "cloud" solutions.

-- 
Anthony de Boer