Backup software

Thanks for all for the information you have given me. Over the last few days i have been testing on a couple of FreeBSD vm's with some test data & borgbackup on linux & FreeBSD. Also going to give zfs send/receive a look at. With the servers out of the way it is a case of looking at configuring backups on the Windows pc's that the clowns in the office use. The usual case of not saving data in the allocated locations & just plonking it on the desktop, then wondering where it has gone after deleting it. I have a track record of over 27 years of no data loss on the servers. The gas service coordinator lost a hole database years ago, which mangled itself & it's built in backup was not working but saying all was ok. After that shambles i got the job of recovering what a could of the database & create a new database with Ye Olde Lotus Approach because they no longer trusted the application they had. I managed to recover about 50% of the database & had the directors daughter typing for weeks to input the lost data. In the end they finally saw sense & let me handle all the IT work for the small office.
 
ngnicholson said:
it's built in backup was not working but saying all was ok.
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Don't test your backups, test your restore procedures. He's not the first, and won't be the last, that diligently created "backups" only to find out those backups are useless at the worst possible time.
 
Also, test the restore with different equipment. You'd be very upset when you try to restore using a different DAT tape drive and find that the one doing the writing was a bit out of alignment and could read it itself, only a brand new one can not.
 
Yes before i had anything to do with that system they had used it for years but never checked any file recovery. Turned out the software was very buggy most backups not done or stopped part way with a nice your data backed up ok message.

I check backups regularly with a random partial or full recovery to a vm system & check against the production. Yes it is only a small plumbing firm but the data to me is the business.
 
ngnicholson said:
What backup software do you use to backup windows pc's, mac's to your FreeBSD servers. Looking for recommendations, Linux i just rsync.
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Macrium Reflect to create Windows drive C: image, then copy image to FreeBSD zfs directory. rsync (using cwrsync on the Windows box) to backup the Windows drive D: data directly to a FreeBSD zfs directory.

And yes, I've tested the drive C: image restore process to be sure it works.
 
Fipscode said:
Why rsync and not zfs send/receive between two pools? ;)
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In the past it was a flexibility I wanted to have between ZFS and other filesystems - today - just continuing to use what works - I have my own 'parallel' scripts for backups - need to create an article about it some time.

As for the ZFS send/recv ... its really good - especially with incremental ones - but managing these snapshots - creating them - cleaning after them when the network connection is broken - resuming them - I believe I would need some *external* ZFS snapshot/sync manager instead resolving this by my own ... of course I can - but do I want to/need to? Probably not.

Its also a 'problem' of rsync(1) that its just good enough and also works well with ZFS (or anything else).

My backups are usually throughput limited - so does not matter if I would use latest ZFS incremental snapshots or rsync(1) - they would still take similar time.

Its also another thing - and I am not a big fan of it - so called cloud backups - for these I use rclone(1) instead - so even if I would 'migrate' to ZFS send/recv for everything - I would still need rclone(1) for the cloud - so again - lack of motivation here ...

Also the structure of devices below the data makes ZFS usage harder - if it would be sync between one redundant ZFS pool to another - then ZFS send/recv is simple - but in my case I prefer to have multiple sets/copies, a local online copy, local offline copy, and also a remote offsite copy - each of these places have different disks below, some are 2TB + 5TB, some are 2TB + 4TB - so with rsync(1) its a lot easier to sync dirs in the /data dir then making all the exceptions with ZFS.
 
ngnicholson said:
What backup software do you use to backup windows pc's, mac's to your FreeBSD servers. Looking for recommendations, Linux i just rsync.
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Only one of my laptops (two actually if I include an old 32-bit i386 machine) has a Windows partition. It's not used often, except for income tax software, software to configure Seagate USB disks, and Logitech devices. It's not used often. I back it up using ntfsclone (par tof the fusefs-ntfs pkg) and dd. This is pretty much what Clonezilla does.

And, using dd I've been able to clone my Windows partition from an old machine to a new machine, with the caveat that you cannot clone from MBR (legacy BIOS) to GPT (UEFI). I did try to clone a Windows 10 partition from legacy BIOS to UEFI, creating the EFI partition by hand. It ran for 15 minutes, then blue screened. It wouldn't boot after that.

If you want to clone a bootable copy, use dd. Make sure the disk geometry is the same and the partition is in the exact same space as on the origianal. You can clone to a virtual machine this way as well.
 
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