Back it up

Backing up personal data is like flossing, you know you should do it...

Personally I use time machine on the macs in the house, on other boxen (linux) I tend to copy/rsync home directories. But in many cases most data I care about is "in the cloud" (so I have washed my hands of responsibility of its safety - now is that a good thing ???).

What does interest me though is all the many ways that specific server apps demand they be backed up. Isn't that annoying for operations people? They need to have DBA/specialists for every single app to know how to back it up, each has their own process.

This is silly and not sustainable, thankfully modern filesystems can help. When you think about it, it is obvious. A backup really needs to help you out with 2 things: 1) allow you to recover in the event of a disaster of some sort - so you go back as recently as possible and continue processing. and 2) go back to a point in time.

File system snapshotting (via ZFS, or using virtual machines, whatever) seems good enough for most of this (#2 can be a bit of a problem - you need to keep sensible snapshots frozen in time, and be vigilant to watch out for data corruption inside an app - having versions of data inside an app can help this, but this is then not an IT infrastructure issue, no generic solution can help).

Certainly a whole lot less hassle for IT if they can just reset elements of infrastructure back to how they were at a single point in time. Everyone wins.