Anian wants to lean better backup

Anian writes...


Hi Chris and Wes,

I still love the show. I follow most JB Podcasts, but TechSnap is probably my favourite. The old and the new format.

I have a question about backups: I managed to cause some mayor problems at my own company when I fiddled with our Nextclouds encryption settings and accidentally crypto-locked a lot of our data.

It started on one evening when a colleague of mine had problems syncing some files. I had a look at the logs and it seemed that it had something to do with the server side encryption I turned on a few month ago. Since it was causing problems I decided, tired after a long day of work, to just turn the encryption off again. I checked the manual, created a snapshot of the volume the data was stored on and entered the commands, and went home.

The next morning everybody turned on their laptop and a lot of files started syncing. But they could not open them. They where suddenly encrypted. It turned out there is a bug with the decryption: https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues/8311 and to add insult to injury the file snapshot alone did not help recovery immediately because I had forgotten to snapshot the database as well, which was on another volume. I'm still trying to recover some data. Luckily a lot of data was not synced yet or could be recovered otherwise, but I'm still working on it.

But that's just the backstory. Now to my actual question:

Where can I find resources to build a better backup solution for our company? In general snapshots are great but I get the feeling that they are not a useful backup for data and they definitely don't fit every need I have.

So I want to backup on a file level. With being a listener since Dan was a host, I of course looked at bacula, but I'm not sure how complicated that is to manage. An alternative might be burp maybe. But in general I'm just not sure where to start. Do I need such tools or are some cronjobs with rsync fine for the start?

Where can I learn more about good backup practices? The bacula handbook is great but are there any other goto resources? Am i overthinking it and I just need to make sure we have a copy of all data somewhere, no matter how organized? Are snapshots just fine? We are just a startup at that point, so it's not a huge amount of files in total.

It would be great to get some input from you on this topic. How do you manage backups in "cloud infrastructure" for example at DigitalOcean?

Keep going with the great show and greetings from Germany,
Anian