Archiving / Backup
From Gruff Goat Wiki
Archiving/backup and restoring are very important to the long-term viability of any IT professional. If its done wrong or incorrectly; data may be permanently lost, servers may be down for extended periods, and large sums of money may be lost or spent.
I use a number of different process depending upon the operating system, on-site or off-site storage, and archive standby status. Here is an attempt to document and share all current and deprecated methods used.
Standby Statuses
I use different standby statuses to denote how quickly I can go from archive to live. The statuses and their meanings are:
- Live backup
- A online server or cloud server that may be accessed or turned on at the flip of a switch and simple redirection of server traffic.
- On-server archive
- An archive that is stored on the server it is derived from. This makes it readily available for data restoration as long as the server is functioning and accessible.
- Cloud archive
- An archive stored in the cloud.
- Backup server archive
- An archive stored on a server whose primary purpose is for managing of archives
- Storage archive
- An archive moved from the backup server or cloud to a storage server
- Offline archive
- An archive moved from the storage server to an offline media
- Offline and off-site archive
- Offline media moved to secure off-site storage
Archive Levels
Split
Often the size of a simple archive becomes quite large (>4Gb). In these cases, I choose to split the archive into smaller pieces. This is typically performed using the split command.
split -b 4g sourcefile outfile_prefix_
