Backup Strategy

[turick]

Is there a particular backup strategy that is widely supported by the community? I have traditionally done full file-level backups to another drive, which I'm sure can't really be replaced, but should this be used in conjunction with snapshots? Should the snapshots be stored locally and externally?

 

[jgreco]

Full file-level backups is pretty much a gold standard. Get maybe three drives and rotate, that way you always have two backup copies when you blow away the "current" one and start copying onto it and discover that your filer has just panicked and taken all the files with it. One copy is probably insufficient because fate will pick that moment to kill a single backup drive. That's paranoid but paranoid can help to secure your data.

Snapshots are mostly for sysadmin "ease of recovery." You can roll back and get to a particular version of a file or tree. Definitely not a form of backup though.