My server boots off a pair of SSDs, tied together in a ZFS mirror. Proxmox supports ZFS boot (thanks to its Ubuntu kernel), and lets you configure it through the installer. When I installed my server, this is what I wanted, as it meant the OS and data disks for…
Today is world backup day, a day to highlight the importance of backups, protecting data, and keeping systems secure (at least that's what Wikipedia says). I'm taking this day as a chance to review my backup strategy, and make sure I'm happy with the coverage I'm getting. I mentioned a…
Last night, the sky was filled with thunderstorms. For a few hours, there was some of the loudest thunder and brightest lightning I’d ever seen. At the time, this was quite interesting, and nicely helped cool down the air too. This morning however, less fun. Shortly after 07:30, my monitoring…
It’s something no one wants to see: You open up an important file, and are met with very different content to what you’re expecting. This weekend, that happened to me. Losing data is terrible, no matter what it is. To a bit of a perfectionist like me any loss of…
Lots of applications use databases to store data. It’s a fast and efficient way to store data, whilst also providing features like searching and integrity checks. Password manager, file storage, media library, RSS reader, almost everything will use some form of database. However, backing them up isn’t quite as simple…
I have a bunch of VMs and LXCs on my proxmox server. Whilst I like to keep as little data in each of them as possible, and instead mount in my storage (in the form of a ZFS and snapraid pool), I still use proxmox’s built-in backup feature to back…
Backups are critical to any systems longevity and reliability. If you’re not backing up your data, stop reading this now, go do it, then come back… Assuming none of you suddenly panicked and left, let’s keep going. You can keep telling yourself otherwise, but eventually, every system will experience some…
You should back up your data, properly! If you’re not, you’re playing a dangerous game with fate. Computers are pretty reliable, but they also go wrong, often. You should always backup your files, but backing up a containerized application isn’t quite as simple. A container is 3 things:ConfigurationVolumesNetworking The point…
Duplicati is one of my favourite backup system. It’s pretty fast, supports numerous backup sources, and has a nice configuration web UI. Unfortunately however, it can’t be used to back up remote files. In fact, I can’t find a nice fully-features backup solution which does do this, which sucks. Another…