5 Jun
2012
5 Jun
'12
1:51 a.m.
Hi Peet,
On Mon, Jun 04, 2012 at 10:29:35AM +0200, Peet Grobler wrote:
Thank you for your decent, very verbose explanations
of what is going wrong. I believe this distills trust in your clients. First off, we know
you know what you're doing. Second - we are informed of problems, with much detail,
and along the process of fixing it we are informed of what you've done so far, and
what to expect.
Thanks to you and others who have commented. Especially those who
were affected, for your understanding.
Thanks must also go to Miah Gregory who was present in our IRC
channel and offered advice on how to best recover, for several
hours. I was on basically the right track but Miah's advice sped
things up quite a bit.
Anyway this is not the last word on this matter of course. I'm still
working on a plan of action and I will get back to you in due
course. This is going to include service credit for those who were
affected, as the data loss (even minor as it appears to have been)
that arose from this sort of event was completely unacceptable and
should be avoidable.
I assume you don't back up the VPSes? It's the
customer's responsibility? I have no problem with this, just wondering.
That is correct. We do offer to run backups for people for free,
except for the disk space required to keep them in:
http://bitfolk.com/customer_information.html#toc_2_Local_backups
Naturally I would urge everyone to have some sort of backup regime
as calamities such as human error, multiple simultaneous disk
failure, datacentre fires, natural disasters, etc. do happen.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
5 Jun
5 Jun
8:59 a.m.
New subject: backups (was Re: hardware problems on barbar, 1826Z and ongoing)
On 05/06/2012 02:51, Andy Smith wrote:
That is correct. We do offer to run backups for people for free,
except for the disk space required to keep them in:
http://bitfolk.com/customer_information.html#toc_2_Local_backups
Naturally I would urge everyone to have some sort of backup regime
as calamities such as human error, multiple simultaneous disk
failure, datacentre fires, natural disasters, etc. do happen.
I do take backups (regular rsyncs of / from my VPS to a machine here) -
I've never needed to actually call on them though, apart from recovering
the odd file lost due to human error.
I've always wondered: is there a procedure that allows such full backups
to be restored back onto a VPS in the event of a total loss?
Thanks
Joseph
9:22 a.m.
New subject: backups (was Re: hardware problems on barbar, 1826Z and ongoing)
Hi Joseph,
On Tue, Jun 05, 2012 at 09:59:01AM +0100, Joseph Heenan wrote:
I do take backups (regular rsyncs of / from my VPS to
a machine here)
- I've never needed to actually call on them though, apart from
recovering the odd file lost due to human error.
I've always wondered: is there a procedure that allows such full
backups to be restored back onto a VPS in the event of a total loss?
It depends what form your backups take.
If you had a tar.gz file then you might boot into rescue
environment, mount your block device, unpack tar.gz over the top of
it.
If you had a disk image file you might boot into rescue environment
and cat or dd the image over your block device.
Seems like most people only back up data and configuration though.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
12:53 p.m.
New subject: backups (was Re: hardware problems on barbar, 1826Z and ongoing)
On Tue, 2012-06-05 at 09:22 +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
Seems like most people only back up data and
configuration though.
I back up the entire disk image personally, the change set between
backups is generally zero for system binaries etc, plus it provides a
useful audit tool should any box get hacked.
It also means when restoring that I don't need to worry about whether or
not the box will restore into a working state or not due to package
updates or config/running state stored in non-standard locations.
Just my 2p though, I tend to be overly zealous about these things. :)
--
Regards,
Miah
DSIS - IT Support and Consultancy
0141 4382030
http://www.dsis.co.uk/
DSIS is a trading name of Dark Silence Ltd, registered in Scotland SC341532
1:10 p.m.
New subject: backups (was Re: hardware problems on barbar, 1826Z and ongoing)
Miah, would you mind sharing your approach for backing up the entire
image? I am new to VPS backing up, and am searching for a good
approach.
Thanks in advance.
(Sent from mobile)
On Jun 5, 2012, at 8:53, Miah Gregory <miah(a)darksilence.net> wrote:
On Tue, 2012-06-05 at 09:22 +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
Seems like most people only back up data and
configuration though.
I back up the entire disk image personally, the change set between
backups is generally zero for system binaries etc, plus it provides a
useful audit tool should any box get hacked.
It also means when restoring that I don't need to worry about whether or
not the box will restore into a working state or not due to package
updates or config/running state stored in non-standard locations.
Just my 2p though, I tend to be overly zealous about these things. :)
--
Regards,
Miah
DSIS - IT Support and Consultancy
0141 4382030
http://www.dsis.co.uk/
DSIS is a trading name of Dark Silence Ltd, registered in Scotland SC341532
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users mailing list
users(a)lists.bitfolk.com
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3:59 p.m.
New subject: backups (was Re: hardware problems on barbar, 1826Z and ongoing)
On Tue, 2012-06-05 at 09:10 -0400, S P wrote:
Thanks in advance.
(Sent from mobile)
On Jun 5, 2012, at 8:53, Miah Gregory <miah(a)darksilence.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 2012-06-05 at 09:22 +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
>
>> Seems like most people only back up data and configuration though.
>
> I back up the entire disk image personally, the change set between
> backups is generally zero for system binaries etc, plus it provides a
> useful audit tool should any box get hacked.
>
> It also means when restoring that I don't need to worry about whether or
> not the box will restore into a working state or not due to package
> updates or config/running state stored in non-standard locations.
>
> Just my 2p though, I tend to be overly zealous about these things. :)
Miah, would you mind sharing your approach for backing
up the entire
image? I am new to VPS backing up, and am searching for a good
approach.
Nothing particularly exciting I'm afraid. I have a separate backup host
running rsnapshot + ssh/rsync which connects to each machine daily and
rsyncs over the entire filesystem minus a few exclusions.
I'll need to re-test my bare "virtual-metal" restore procedure sometime,
but in essence this is just the same in reverse, boot new vm image, shut
down pretty much every service, rsync everything back over the top of
the running machine, reboot, done.
A few files need tweaking if you're restoring to a VM with non-identical
network addresses and so on, eg. /etc/network/interfaces, /etc/hosts
etc.
--
Regards,
Miah
DSIS - IT Support and Consultancy
0141 4382030
http://www.dsis.co.uk/
DSIS is a trading name of Dark Silence Ltd, registered in Scotland SC341532
6 Jun
6 Jun
6:48 a.m.
New subject: backups (was Re: hardware problems on barbar, 1826Z and ongoing)
On 05/06/12 14:10, S P wrote:
Miah, would you mind sharing your approach for backing
up the entire
image? I am new to VPS backing up, and am searching for a good
approach.
It's worth taking a look at dirvish - available as a standard package in
Debian.
It builds on top of rsync to enable you to keep multiple complete
snapshots of a system. I use a dedicated backup box, with RAID1 disks,
to take backups of a number of systems including my Bitfolk virtual server.
John
9:39 a.m.
New subject: backups (was Re: hardware problems on barbar, 1826Z and ongoing)
On 06/06/12 07:48, John Winters wrote:
On 05/06/12 14:10, S P wrote:
I can recommend backuupc
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Miah, would you mind sharing your approach for
backing up the entire
image? I am new to VPS backing up, and am searching for a good
approach.
It's worth taking a look at dirvish - available as a standard package
in Debian.
It builds on top of rsync to enable you to keep multiple complete
snapshots of a system. I use a dedicated backup box, with RAID1
disks, to take backups of a number of systems including my Bitfolk
virtual server.
John
_______________________________________________
users mailing list
users(a)lists.bitfolk.com
https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/users 
5 Jun
5 Jun
1:14 p.m.
New subject: backups (was Re: hardware problems on barbar, 1826Z and ongoing)
On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 1:53 PM, Miah Gregory <miah(a)darksilence.net> wrote:
On Tue, 2012-06-05 at 09:22 +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
Hey, I don't think it's overly zealous at all.
This is what I would like, but I thought it would put an overhead on
the service provided for everyone if everyone backed up using this
approach.
I'm intrigued as to how you're doing this :-) Are you dd'ing
partitions or something? O.o
Cheers, Gerald
Seems like most people only back up data and
configuration though.
I back up the entire disk image personally, the change set between
backups is generally zero for system binaries etc, plus it provides a
useful audit tool should any box get hacked.
It also means when restoring that I don't need to worry about whether or
not the box will restore into a working state or not due to package
updates or config/running state stored in non-standard locations.
Just my 2p though, I tend to be overly zealous about these things. :)
6 Jun
6 Jun
5:40 a.m.
New subject: backups (was Re: hardware problems on barbar, 1826Z and ongoing)
Hi,
On Tue, Jun 05, 2012 at 02:14:21PM +0100, Gerald Davies wrote:
On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 1:53 PM, Miah Gregory
<miah(a)darksilence.net> wrote:
> I back up the entire disk image personally […]
[…]
This is what I would like, but I thought it would put
an overhead on
the service provided for everyone if everyone backed up using this
approach.
At the moment the only metric we're charging by for the backups is
the disk space used, so this sort of thing is really for me to worry
about.
Bear in mind if just backing up the filesystem with rsync then
data inside the memory of applications (e.g. pending changes in
databases like MySQL) may not get backed up properly. So you
probably want additional stuff to dump that data out consistently or
whatever.
While BitFolk's backup solution is designed to be fairly simple and
only uses rsync, if you're doing your own solution then you can back
up a VPS the same way that you back up any host, so just think about
how you normally do it.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
4590
days inactive
4591
days old
9 comments
7 participants
participants (7)
-
Andy Smith -
Gerald Davies -
John Winters -
Joseph Heenan -
Miah Gregory -
S P -
Simon Bell