A Backup Approach For Ubuntu Linux
- 1. My Current Backup Strategy For anybody boring enough to care Pg 1 of 24 [email protected] By: Daniel Rosehill (V1.2)
- 2. Pg 2 of 24 Once upon a time, about 10 years ago, I had a laptop By: Daniel Rosehill Linux backups, V1.2
- 3. Pg 3 of 24 I used this laptop to make videos, edit audio, and do homework By: Daniel Rosehill Linux backups, V1.2
- 4. Pg 4 of 24 This laptop ran a operating system (OS) called Windows By: Daniel Rosehill Linux backups, V1.2
- 5. Pg 5 of 24 One day, this laptop started to misbehave. Every time it booted, it showed the Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD) By: Daniel Rosehill Linux backups, V1.2
- 6. Pg 6 of 24 As a humble high school student, this spelled doom and threatened to scupper my budding career as a Lego movie producer. My best friend had a brother who was kind of nerdy. One day, I told him of the unfortunate plight of my laptop. By: Daniel Rosehill Linux backups, V1.2
- 7. His name was Daniel too. And he said this: Just use Linux! Pg 7 of 24By: Daniel Rosehill Linux backups, V1.2
- 8. Being unenlightened, I had no idea what he was talking about. But he handed me a live USB and assured me my computer would be back up and running in no time. Pg 8 of 24 Here ya go!Thank you, Daniel 2! The Gift of Linux By: Daniel Rosehill Linux backups, V1.2
- 9. Pg 9 of 24 Daniel 2 was no joker. My laptop was running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with GNOME very soon! I told you so! By: Daniel Rosehill Linux backups, V1.2
- 10. Pg 10 of 24 Sadly, my return to functional computing was to be relatively short lived. Despite quickly become enamored by the open source community, I couldn’t help but notice that Linux was buggy .... very buggy indeed, in fact. Periodically, after an upgrade bricked the installation or a package manager got broken, I would make empty promises to myself that this would be the last time reinstalling the system from scratch. Oh yeah, we’re ironing out some bugs The package manager is broken yet again. Also, a fire has been detected. Sucks to be you! By: Daniel Rosehill Linux backups, V1.2
- 11. Pg 11 of 24 Oh dear, oh dear! Have you considered using Windows Like a normal person? Upgrade to 18.04 LTS failed Hard drive formatted Data lost Have a great day! As Linux got more stable, and I got better at using it, the time between having to reinstall the system got longer. This actually made the whole process even more frustrating because the amount of packages I installed, and configuration changes I made, tended to accrue over time. I was older now. I had clients to do work for. If I were to continue using Linux, something had to change By: Daniel Rosehill Linux backups, V1.2
- 12. Pg 12 of 24 That’s the spirit! Data lost again. But it’s all good. We have a backup! And that solution was called: A decent backup strategy! Here’s what that entails: By: Daniel Rosehill Linux backups, V1.2
- 13. Pg 13 of 24 Backups enthusasits like Daniel are COOL! Do this And key your data safe! By: Daniel Rosehill Linux backups, V1.2
- 14. Pg 14 of 24 Don’t forget to copy your backups offsite! If you have a laptop, then use an external SSD/NAS Here’s how I implemented this initially: By: Daniel Rosehill Linux backups, V1.2
- 15. Pg 15 of 24 Here’s how I implemented this initially: ● I have four drives in my desktop ● One drive (480GB) is for the operating system ● One drive (240GB) is exclusively for Clonezilla bare metal backups ● One drive (480GB) is exclusively for Timeshift restore points ● One drive (120GB) is a Windows installation. It doesn’t deserve more space! By: Daniel Rosehill Linux backups, V1.2
- 16. You could also do: Pg 16 of 24 RAID 1 RedundaNcy BACKUP By: Daniel Rosehill Linux backups, V1.2
- 17. Now I do: Pg 17 of 24 Synology NAS Daily. Incrementals Via SSH on LAN Quarterly. Bare metal clones. Via Cloud Sync. Monthly. By: Daniel Rosehill Linux backups, V1.2
- 18. Questions And Answers Pg 18 of 24 I take the offsite backup to stay 3-2-1 compliant (if something were to happen to both my computer and the NAS, I would need another physically isolated backup to restore from.) Using Timeshift and Clonezilla allows me to take both full disk images (very reliable) and incremental clones. Why back up with Timeshift and Clonezilla and to an offsite object storage bucket? How are the offsite backups run? Because Cloudberry can push incremental backups to the NAS, it makes sense to me to back these up via Cloud Sync on a regular basis. The disk clones that Clonezilla takes are naturally heavy and my uplink is slow enough to be a serious bottleneck. I push one of these images up once a year. But given that most local data isn’t critical, I think that this is unnecessary. Do you test your backups for restorability? I’ve used Timeshift to roll back changes to the system probably five times over the past year. I have a lot of faith in it. I have test restored a Clonezilla image too. By: Daniel Rosehill Linux backups, V1.2
- 19. Disaster Recovery Pg 19 of 24 In the event of sudden catastrophic SSD / primary drive failure... By: Daniel Rosehill Linux backups, V1.2 ● I keep a HDD with a basic Ubuntu setup ready to roll ● The idea here is to minimize disruption / maximize business continuity while I’m waiting to restore my old system Restore via Timeshift: Otherwise.... ● Purchase new storage media ● Install Ubuntu and Timeshift ● Copy over the snapshot directory from the NAS (Timeshift doesn’t backup/restore to/from network devices ● See if it works But if it doesn’t....
- 20. Disaster Recovery (2) Pg 20 of 24By: Daniel Rosehill Linux backups, V1.2 Otherwise.... Clonezilla backup image New drive ● Recover directly from Clonezilla image on NAS And if bare metal recovery fails / the NAS is unavailable due to some unforseen physical event: buy new storage and install new system. Install Cloudberry. And then attempt a restore from the system backup image stored on B2. Via MSP360 / Cloudberry
- 21. Backing Up The Cloud Pg 21 of 24By: Daniel Rosehill Linux backups, V1.2 ● I also try to back up everything I host on the cloud: including both hosting accounts and SaaS data. ● I use the rsync CLI and Bash scripts to pull hosting data down into an NAS. And periodically, I run full cPanel exports (this mimics the local backup approach). ● For all other SaaS: I manually export data every few months and put the export into an object storage bucket. ● I use Synology DSM’s Cloud Sync functionality to then pull that down into the NAS so that it’s stored onsite too and therefore 3-2-1 compliant (two clouds, one local backup). SaaS Hosting Manual and rsync DSM Cloud Sync Backup 1 Backup 2
- 22. And In Full Pg 22 of 24By: Daniel Rosehill Linux backups, V1.2 SaaS Hosting Manual and rsync DSM Cloud Sync Backup 1 Backup 2 Active Backup For GSuite Cloud 2 Via Multcloud
- 23. Making It All Work Pg 23 of 24By: Daniel Rosehill Linux backups, V1.2 A backup calendar for whatever can’t be automated I also documented the process pretty thoroughly
- 24. In Conclusion Pg 24 of 24By: Daniel Rosehill Linux backups, V1.2 This may seem obsessive, but not having to reinstall the operating system since I instituted this has been so useful. I can play around with Linux as much as I want without fear of what might happen if I break something. To date, Timeshift has been enough. But knowing that I have other backups availble incase that system fails is helpful too. I review my backup approach periodically so will be putting out V1.3 as soon as I have updated some parts of the configuration or have different data pools to protect. Feedback / suggestions are always welcome: [email protected].