Formalise backups

[Amar Takhar]

• Currently we use more than one system for backups formalise all of this under one system using restic.net

This does not mean we aren't backing up. We need a formal procedure and to use one method across all backups required.

While we can use the same tool to do the backups certain tasks require the additional use of external software or commands such as databases.

[Amar Takhar]

This project has been funded by an anonymous donor, thank you!

[Amar Takhar]

Still evaluating whether we will go with restic.net or go with a more comprehensive system such as Bacula or Amanda. We really don't have any huge requirements for backups most of our files don't change often and vast majority of our generated data are archives which are already put on our FTP archive or service logs.

Choosing something heavyweight will require a lot more long term maintenance in 9 years we have not needed to use a backup. If we spend more time restoring a backup it's worth it for it to be more difficult to restore than spending a long time maintaining a complex system for quicker restoration.

Whichever we choose we're not talking about any loss of data.

[Amar Takhar]

After looking at this some more it's not worth it to go with a heavyweight solution. If we spend an extra few hours recovering from a backup it's OK. To re-iterate: we've never needed to recover in 9 years so far.

If we had setup something very detailed for backups we would have spent a lot of time maintaining it. A simple crontab backup will work for us very well. We'll still have snapshots of our backups and the ability to recover any increment. Backing up restic repositories is also extremely easy. They can be encrypted and the database format is extremely well documented and is considered a public API.