[PVE-User] Backup recommendation

[Guy]

I use bacula to manage my backups.. And rather than backing up to tapes.. I use SATA drives.. They are cheap and store greater capacity.  I maintain several copies of the data.. Including an online backup and an off site backup.. Where I treat the disks as if they were tapes and remove them and store them in a flight case off site.

take a look at bacula and vchanger (which is the disk as tape system).

As for data integrity I have a script which exports interesting databases to an SQL file on a file system which is then backed up.  This way I keep the VM as a complete backup and can reload the SQL from backup if necessary.

--Guy

On 15 Oct 2013, at 11:07, Amand Tihon <alrj+pve at alrj.org> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> Disclaimer: I understand that my question is not strictly related to Proxmox. 
> Feel free to ignore if you think it's too much off-topic, or reply privately.
> 
> Would anyone have recommendations for good backup + DRP setup and strategy in 
> a Proxmox cluster? The snapshot functionnality readily available through 
> Proxmox is of great help for DRP, but makes things pretty complex when you 
> only need to restore some files. Also, it doesn't really account for files or 
> database integrity, unless pre- and post-backup scripts can be started on the 
> guest.
> 
> FYI, we are not using any kind of virtualization yet. Our current backups are 
> done using DataProtector and we use ISO images created with MondoRescue for 
> DRP.
> 
> Just to get things started, here's our current idea:
> 
> - Install a bare-metal server with large local disks as a "backup server"
> - Hook a tape library to that server
> - Configure weekly (or even daily?) snapshots of the VM. Retention TBD.
> - Setup some kind of rsync of each guest to the backup server (only rsync, not
>  a hardlinks-based history rsync thing). Pre-, post-backup scripts go here.
> - During the day, take a classic tape backup of the backup server: weekly full
>  with daily differential.
> 
> Advantages I see:
> - Ability to "close" the system during rsync backups, for data integrity,
> - Have a full copy of the guests' filesystems with history on tape,
> - The backup to tape is "offline", from the production point of view
> - Tapes can be stored outside of the server room (safe from flooding or fire)
> 
> Disadvantages:
> - Cost, since we more or less duplicate the backup infrastructure (server AND
>  tapes), but reliable backups and DRP are absolutely mandatory.
> - We don't know yet how rsync will perform on a filesystem with hundreds of
>  thousands files...
> 
> Is there any software you would suggest ? Can this solution be improved ? 
> Any comment would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Amand Tihon.
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