Disaster-Recovery - vo.rs

Bare-Metal Restore: Rehearsing the Recovery You Dread

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 08:45:00 +0000

Every backup strategy I have ever written about on this site — Borg, Restic, Kopia, the whole 3-2-1 discipline — answers the question “can I get my files back.” None of them, by themselves, answer a harder question: if the machine itself is gone, cratered motherboard, stolen chassis, a fire that took the whole rack, how long until a replacement box is running the same services again, and does anyone actually know the steps. That is bare-metal restore, and it is the drill almost nobody rehearses, because rehearsing it means deliberately wrecking a working system to prove you can bring it back.

The 3-2-1 Rule, Actually Implemented at Home

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 09:30:00 +0000

Everyone who has spent five minutes reading about backups can recite 3-2-1: three copies of your data, on two different media, with one copy offsite. It is repeated so often that it has become wallpaper — a phrase people nod at without ever building it. I nodded at it for about three years before I actually laid out, disk by disk and cron job by cron job, which piece of my setup satisfied which leg of the rule. The exercise was uncomfortable, because it turned out my “offsite backup” was a second drive in the same server chassis, which is not offsite by any definition that survives a house fire.