[Gluster-infra] Backup strategy for our infrastructure?

[Louis Zuckerman]

Following up on my experiments in rackspace...

Scheduled server image is by far the easiest thing to use. No software is
required on the machine and it's trivial to restore the whole system. The
platform can make automatic daily images & prune old ones.

Backups are a bit more involved, requiring an agent installed on the
machine. As far as I can tell files can only be restored to the original
backed up machine, which is inconvenient. I would like the ability to
restore files to a clone of the original machine, or somewhere else
entirely. I've opened a support ticket asking about restoring to a clone &
will update when I have more info on that. One thing I noticed about
restored directories: they don't delete new files, only restoring the state
of backed up files (recreating them if they were deleted). IMHO, there
should be an option to delete any other files not in the backup when
restoring, so the restored directory structure is identical to when it was
backed up.

*In summary, I strongly suggest that we immediately enable scheduled image
creation for all of our cloud servers. That will take just minutes to set
up and provides an essential safety net.*

Best regards,

-louis


On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 4:21 AM, Justin Clift <justin at gluster.org> wrote:

> On 21/08/2014, at 4:17 AM, Louis Zuckerman wrote:
> <snip>
> > In order to "kick the tires" on these two alternatives, I have set them
> both up on my SonarQube server, the one called gluster-sonar in the RS
> control panel.  I'll check back after a few days to see how the backups are
> going, and test a restore from both services to compare.
>
> Cool. :)
>
>
> > Can anyone suggest an off-rackspace backup solution we could use in
> addition to these services?
>
> Two options spring to mind immediately.
>
> 1) We could rsync (etc) whatever's in the Rackspace backup to
>    somewhere inside Red Hat.  Kaleb keeps on pointing out we
>    have a bunch of servers and storage available inside the
>    Red Hat firewall now.
>
> 2) I have a (personal) Linode that's been online for years,
>    and is kept up to date package wise.  It normally has
>    ~20GB free.
>
> Option 1) is probably better.  It obviously has restrictions
> on who can access it due to firewall (eg RH staff).  But I'm
> thinking that should be workable since it's not the primary
> backup set.
>
> ?
>
> Regards and best wishes,
>
> Justin Clift
>
> --
> GlusterFS - http://www.gluster.org
>
> An open source, distributed file system scaling to several
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>
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>
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