6 ms·

Ask HN: Help me fix your backups

46 points by drewcrawford 16y ago

pwim 16y ago
As a software development company, all of our code is in a git repository that has a remote on a VPS. Our documents are primarily Google docs. Important docs are checked into git. Nothing we have locally that is important is not also at some remote location.
- drewcrawford 16y ago
  Thanks, that is great feedback. Maybe so much is web-based now that backups aren't really relevant. Is there any pain associated with restoring your dev environment? How long would it take you to get your text editor reinstalled, color scheme set back up, system preferences back, etc.?
  - dlsspy 16y ago
    Almost everything I care about is managed via git. That includes editor and shell configs and ~/bin -- restoring my own dev environment is so easy, I just randomly do it on different computers. Every time I make a change worth saving and want to share it, I push it to gerrit, which means there are now two copies (one on my laptop and one "in the cloud" on my gerrit server). Every time a change is reviewed, verified, and blessed as part of our code base, the reviewer or verifier pushes a button to submit the change, it's automatically sent up to github, github fires webhooks that automatically replicate the data down to a machine in the office, another copy on our build master (also in the office), and then, shortly after, another copy on every build slave. Internally, files are stored via nfs or smb onto a solaris box that takes snapshots every 15m. Those snapshots are not stored externally. The biggest part of our data, though, is made up of vm images. Big files that change a lot. Restoring them hurts, but anything that loads up IO on that box makes vmware think the NFS server isn't responding and it unmounts and remounts it (it even does this when nothing's using it -- though the NFS server itself works fine for other clients during this time). I wouldn't mind a backup procedure there, but it'd have to not break that. (sorry to not use your form... the further down I got, the less it applied to me)
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- surki 16y ago
  I assume you are using git to manage your home directory. I use gibak[1] for the same(built on top of git). Out of curiosity, what is your setup like? [1] http://eigenclass.org/hiki/gibak-backup-system-introduction http://eigenclass.org/hiki/gibak-backup-system-introduction
cperciva 16y ago
How is your data backed up? ... [X] I use Tarsnap ... Where's the "I am Tarsnap" option? Somewhat related: Are the responses to this going to be made public somewhere? I'd love to see what they look like (for obvious reasons) and was thinking just last week that maybe I should post a survey to HN and Reddit.
- drewcrawford 16y ago
  Lol. I knew it was you as soon as I saw "I use tarsnap" as the only one checked. I love Tarsnap. I use you for a lot of very-critical-yet-small files. My personal pain point is that I'd like to back up a few TB of data but can't afford to--it would be nice to back up an entire workstation. I'm interested in seeing if that's a sentiment that others share, or if it's just me.
  - cperciva 16y ago
    My personal pain point is that I'd like to back up a few TB of data but can't afford to--it would be nice to back up an entire workstation. Why do you have a few TB of data on a workstation? What sort of work are you doing?
    - drewcrawford 16y ago
      Right now about a quarter of respondents have 1TB or more, so while I'm not in the majority, it seems I'm in good company. 47% of respondents seem to be in the 100GB-1TB bracket as of right now. Here's the breakdown of my data (largish categories only) ==BUSINESS CRITICAL== * 5GB of codebases I've committed to in the last 3 years. * 50GB worth of software. Mostly development tools. Five different versions of XCode, I actually use most of them every day (scary, I know…) * 50GB of VM images I use for development. I could rebuild them, but I really don't want to. * 80GB on my boot volume. Stuff I would backup if and only if I want a live, bootable backup. Save me a lot of time during a restore. * 5GB in ebooks; primarily used for reference / searching * 20GB in music * 20GB in scanned documents, mostly financial and legal paperwork, contracts, etc. * 15GB of e-mail ==OTHER THINGS AVAILABLE NOWHERE ELSE== * 250GB of samples/patches/instruments that I've built over the years and songs I've written (I play keyboards for fun). Not business critical, but I'd be sad if I lost it. * 20GB of backups from computers I used to own growing up. The nostalgia of that game I was coding in middle-school, etc. * 100GB in learning resources I've collected over the years that are out of print or otherwise unavailable anywhere else. Not useful to me (anymore), but sharing them with others is valuable to both me and them. * 20GB of home video * 13GB in personal photos ==THINGS I DON'T WANT TO DOWNLOAD AGAIN== * 375GB of Apple Development videos. I refer to these fairly regularly. I typically watch a few each day to keep up-to-date. * 20GB of Steam games Looking at this list, sure, I could live without some of it. But a lot of it is pretty important, and it would be nice to back up most of it.
Skyline 16y ago
Are you going to post the survey results on HN? I bet a lot of people would find them interesting.
lovskogen 16y ago
Dropbox solved everything backup related for me, and I love it.
- edanm 16y ago
  Absolutely agree. Only problem: getting the 100gb option is too expensive for me (for now), which is a shame. Also, I'd love it if they had a much larger size as well, so I can quietly back up everything without worrying about space.
  - lovskogen 16y ago
    Currentlig using 60% of my 51GB. I've got all workrelated files there (I'm a webdesigner), my music and a folder of collected inspiration. No videos.
    - edanm 16y ago
      I'm also on about 50% of my 50GB. The thing is, I'd rather dump everything in there and not worry about what is and is not "critical".
      - lovskogen 16y ago
        That's what I've done.
- sreitshamer 16y ago
  On the Mac, Dropbox doesn't do so well with restoring metadata: http://www.haystacksoftware.com/blog/2010/06/the-importance-of-metadata-on-the-mac/ http://www.haystacksoftware.com/blog/2010/06/the-importance-... http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/dropbox-backup-bouncer-test.txt http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/dropbox-backup-bouncer-t... (Disclaimer -- I write backup software: http://haystacksoftware.com/arq/ http://haystacksoftware.com/arq/)
  - lovskogen 16y ago
pierrefar 16y ago
One thing to point out: backups in the cloud are useless if you don't have internet access when you want access or to restore data. If you want to fix my backups, make the data readily accessible when there isn't a net connection between me and the service. One time this usually bites is if you just (re-)installed a new OS and you need the network driver, which is only available online. I always keep a backup of the drivers on my external hard disk for this situation. Another service I worry about is Gmail and other Google apps. With email you can easily download the several GB of email onto your hard disk, thus keeping a backup for when you or the service are offline. Dropbox solves this nicely: it's a local folder that's synched to the cloud. If Dropbox is down or I'm offline, I still have access to my data.
larsberg 16y ago
"The biggest problem with backups is" Missing option is impact on the computer while I'm using it. All of the transparent services (especially Time Machine) that I have experience with are abysmally bad at turning themselves off when the machine is being actively used.
- altano 16y ago
  That's my favorite aspect of Windows Home Server's backup. It does it once a day whenever you're asleep. It'll even wake up your machine, back it up, and them put it back to sleep. And it's smart enough to only do this if you're laptop is plugged into AC and not running on battery. And if any machine isn't backed up in a while, you get a Health warning in your system tray. And this is all pretty configurable. How's that for low impact.
  - larsberg 16y ago
    That's awesome! I'm very jealous.
apowell 16y ago
I got about halfway through the survey before realizing it was about workstation backup, not server backup. Time Machine + Dropbox makes workstation backup a solved problem. Slicehost Backup + Tarsnap makes server backup almost a solved problem. And I say almost because I don't like having no choice but to store my full bootable backups with the same provider that hosts my primary server. If I could store bootable weekly images off-site, I'd be golden.
jhg 16y ago
> * Required > Looks like you have a question or two that still needs to be filled out. If I want to skip a question, I should be able to do so.
- lincolnq 16y ago
  Agreed. If you give me a survey and mark all the questions "required", if I find anything I don't want to answer, you're out of luck on the whole survey because I will just click back.
dcreemer 16y ago
Since I've not seen it mentioned yet: I use CrashPlan to back up all of my personal systems, both to a home server and to an remote peer. It's a bit RAM heavy, but other than that nicely stays out of the way & does it's job. The killer feature is trivial peer-to-peer connectivity, making off site backups easy. I'm not affiliated with the company -- just a happy customer.
- huhtenberg 16y ago
  What is this "trivial peer-to-peer connectivity" exactly?

46 points by drewcrawford 16y ago

pwim 16y ago

As a software development company, all of our code is in a git repository that has a remote on a VPS. Our documents are primarily Google docs. Important docs are checked into git. Nothing we have locally that is important is not also at some remote location.

drewcrawford 16y ago
Thanks, that is great feedback. Maybe so much is web-based now that backups aren't really relevant. Is there any pain associated with restoring your dev environment? How long would it take you to get your text editor reinstalled, color scheme set back up, system preferences back, etc.?
- dlsspy 16y ago
  Almost everything I care about is managed via git. That includes editor and shell configs and ~/bin -- restoring my own dev environment is so easy, I just randomly do it on different computers. Every time I make a change worth saving and want to share it, I push it to gerrit, which means there are now two copies (one on my laptop and one "in the cloud" on my gerrit server). Every time a change is reviewed, verified, and blessed as part of our code base, the reviewer or verifier pushes a button to submit the change, it's automatically sent up to github, github fires webhooks that automatically replicate the data down to a machine in the office, another copy on our build master (also in the office), and then, shortly after, another copy on every build slave. Internally, files are stored via nfs or smb onto a solaris box that takes snapshots every 15m. Those snapshots are not stored externally. The biggest part of our data, though, is made up of vm images. Big files that change a lot. Restoring them hurts, but anything that loads up IO on that box makes vmware think the NFS server isn't responding and it unmounts and remounts it (it even does this when nothing's using it -- though the NFS server itself works fine for other clients during this time). I wouldn't mind a backup procedure there, but it'd have to not break that. (sorry to not use your form... the further down I got, the less it applied to me)
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
surki 16y ago
I assume you are using git to manage your home directory. I use gibak[1] for the same(built on top of git). Out of curiosity, what is your setup like? [1] http://eigenclass.org/hiki/gibak-backup-system-introduction http://eigenclass.org/hiki/gibak-backup-system-introduction

cperciva 16y ago

How is your data backed up? ... [X] I use Tarsnap ... Where's the "I am Tarsnap" option? Somewhat related: Are the responses to this going to be made public somewhere? I'd love to see what they look like (for obvious reasons) and was thinking just last week that maybe I should post a survey to HN and Reddit.

drewcrawford 16y ago
Lol. I knew it was you as soon as I saw "I use tarsnap" as the only one checked. I love Tarsnap. I use you for a lot of very-critical-yet-small files. My personal pain point is that I'd like to back up a few TB of data but can't afford to--it would be nice to back up an entire workstation. I'm interested in seeing if that's a sentiment that others share, or if it's just me.
- cperciva 16y ago
  My personal pain point is that I'd like to back up a few TB of data but can't afford to--it would be nice to back up an entire workstation. Why do you have a few TB of data on a workstation? What sort of work are you doing?
  - drewcrawford 16y ago
    Right now about a quarter of respondents have 1TB or more, so while I'm not in the majority, it seems I'm in good company. 47% of respondents seem to be in the 100GB-1TB bracket as of right now. Here's the breakdown of my data (largish categories only) ==BUSINESS CRITICAL== * 5GB of codebases I've committed to in the last 3 years. * 50GB worth of software. Mostly development tools. Five different versions of XCode, I actually use most of them every day (scary, I know…) * 50GB of VM images I use for development. I could rebuild them, but I really don't want to. * 80GB on my boot volume. Stuff I would backup if and only if I want a live, bootable backup. Save me a lot of time during a restore. * 5GB in ebooks; primarily used for reference / searching * 20GB in music * 20GB in scanned documents, mostly financial and legal paperwork, contracts, etc. * 15GB of e-mail ==OTHER THINGS AVAILABLE NOWHERE ELSE== * 250GB of samples/patches/instruments that I've built over the years and songs I've written (I play keyboards for fun). Not business critical, but I'd be sad if I lost it. * 20GB of backups from computers I used to own growing up. The nostalgia of that game I was coding in middle-school, etc. * 100GB in learning resources I've collected over the years that are out of print or otherwise unavailable anywhere else. Not useful to me (anymore), but sharing them with others is valuable to both me and them. * 20GB of home video * 13GB in personal photos ==THINGS I DON'T WANT TO DOWNLOAD AGAIN== * 375GB of Apple Development videos. I refer to these fairly regularly. I typically watch a few each day to keep up-to-date. * 20GB of Steam games Looking at this list, sure, I could live without some of it. But a lot of it is pretty important, and it would be nice to back up most of it.

Skyline 16y ago

Are you going to post the survey results on HN? I bet a lot of people would find them interesting.

lovskogen 16y ago

Dropbox solved everything backup related for me, and I love it.

edanm 16y ago
Absolutely agree. Only problem: getting the 100gb option is too expensive for me (for now), which is a shame. Also, I'd love it if they had a much larger size as well, so I can quietly back up everything without worrying about space.
- lovskogen 16y ago
  Currentlig using 60% of my 51GB. I've got all workrelated files there (I'm a webdesigner), my music and a folder of collected inspiration. No videos.
  - edanm 16y ago
    I'm also on about 50% of my 50GB. The thing is, I'd rather dump everything in there and not worry about what is and is not "critical".
    - lovskogen 16y ago
      That's what I've done.
sreitshamer 16y ago
On the Mac, Dropbox doesn't do so well with restoring metadata: http://www.haystacksoftware.com/blog/2010/06/the-importance-of-metadata-on-the-mac/ http://www.haystacksoftware.com/blog/2010/06/the-importance-... http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/dropbox-backup-bouncer-test.txt http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/dropbox-backup-bouncer-t... (Disclaimer -- I write backup software: http://haystacksoftware.com/arq/ http://haystacksoftware.com/arq/)
- lovskogen 16y ago

pierrefar 16y ago

One thing to point out: backups in the cloud are useless if you don't have internet access when you want access or to restore data. If you want to fix my backups, make the data readily accessible when there isn't a net connection between me and the service. One time this usually bites is if you just (re-)installed a new OS and you need the network driver, which is only available online. I always keep a backup of the drivers on my external hard disk for this situation. Another service I worry about is Gmail and other Google apps. With email you can easily download the several GB of email onto your hard disk, thus keeping a backup for when you or the service are offline. Dropbox solves this nicely: it's a local folder that's synched to the cloud. If Dropbox is down or I'm offline, I still have access to my data.

larsberg 16y ago

"The biggest problem with backups is" Missing option is impact on the computer while I'm using it. All of the transparent services (especially Time Machine) that I have experience with are abysmally bad at turning themselves off when the machine is being actively used.

altano 16y ago
That's my favorite aspect of Windows Home Server's backup. It does it once a day whenever you're asleep. It'll even wake up your machine, back it up, and them put it back to sleep. And it's smart enough to only do this if you're laptop is plugged into AC and not running on battery. And if any machine isn't backed up in a while, you get a Health warning in your system tray. And this is all pretty configurable. How's that for low impact.
- larsberg 16y ago
  That's awesome! I'm very jealous.

apowell 16y ago

I got about halfway through the survey before realizing it was about workstation backup, not server backup. Time Machine + Dropbox makes workstation backup a solved problem. Slicehost Backup + Tarsnap makes server backup almost a solved problem. And I say almost because I don't like having no choice but to store my full bootable backups with the same provider that hosts my primary server. If I could store bootable weekly images off-site, I'd be golden.

jhg 16y ago

> * Required > Looks like you have a question or two that still needs to be filled out. If I want to skip a question, I should be able to do so.

lincolnq 16y ago
Agreed. If you give me a survey and mark all the questions "required", if I find anything I don't want to answer, you're out of luck on the whole survey because I will just click back.

dcreemer 16y ago

Since I've not seen it mentioned yet: I use CrashPlan to back up all of my personal systems, both to a home server and to an remote peer. It's a bit RAM heavy, but other than that nicely stays out of the way & does it's job. The killer feature is trivial peer-to-peer connectivity, making off site backups easy. I'm not affiliated with the company -- just a happy customer.

huhtenberg 16y ago
What is this "trivial peer-to-peer connectivity" exactly?