Backups

Today, I migrated my primary Ubuntu 17.04 development machine to put the root volume onto a thinly provisioned volume. There was a bit of a comedy of errors, so I want to outline what I should have done, vs what actually happened.

What I should have done

As in anything like this, it is important to start with known good backups. In my [backup post]({% post_url 2017-09-10-backups %}), I describe how I’m doing that, and even testing it. Then things would roughly following the following steps:

For my first post, I’d like to discuss some of my strategy that I use for backups.

Backups are one of those things that most people realize are important, yet most people don’t really do them consistently. Aside from that, I’ve found that very few people test their backups.

There are two scenarios that backups are important for:

1. Disaster recovery. After a hard disk crash or other failure, how can I recovery a machine to the state it was in before the crash.
2. Accident recovery. When something is accidentally erased or modified, how can I recovery that file or directory in a state it was in in the past.

These scenarios place different demands on the backup system. They also combine in interesting ways. For example, if after a disaster recovery, how can an older version of a file be restored.