So, I've faithfully had the $10 add-on Linode backup service for over a year now. I thought it would be good security in case I had issues. Well, last night was the first time I've "had issues" (due to a mild backdoor probe) and I decided to just restore one directory from my backup. Great! I go to the list of backups, and peruse the nightly backups. There's the one I wanted, three days ago.

I read the docs on how to restore, but can't find a way to restore this particular backup set. I ask support, and they tell me I can only restore from one of the four pre-determined backup lots (last night, last week, two weeks ago, or my last manual backup). I'm, like, WTF? What's the point of having nightly backups if I can't access them?

I ask support again and I'm told that's what was in the docs, and that's how it works, and I can cancel if I want. So I will, now that I know how brain-dead their service is...

But, I'm just feeling like maybe I'm being too hard on them. Or am I?

Here's my view: if I'm going to pay for a backup service, and if you're going to do a nightly backup, then I ought to be able to access those backups and use them for restores. Doesn't that just seem like common sense?

As it stands now, I can only access last night's backup (known to be dirty) or the one from 8 days ago (known to be clean, but farther back than I want). OR, I can wait another five days until the one I want "rotates into" the last week slot, and then I can do my restore. God knows what they expect me to do with my dirty (missing/broken/lost/etc) files in the days I have to wait.

So, is it just me? Am I being too hard on Linode? Or is this truly just what it seems: a waste of my $10/month for the past year?

thanks,
Bruce

I've never used Linode's backup service and never intend to. It strikes me Linode's backup service is there for convenience and not because it's the right way to do things. Good backups have to be off site, if Linode got cracked or went bust these backups are just as vulnerable as the live images. If the data center your Linode is at goes bust overnight, gets raided by the police, losses its Internet access due to a peering dispute, a careless road digger, or whatever, you lose the live systems and the backups at the same time.

The right way to do backups is remotely and at a schedule appropriate to the data. I have BackupPC running at home doing nightly backups. If every Linode site got nuked from orbit I could take any nightly backup and restore it to a dedicated or virtual machine anywhere.

I use exactly the same setup for the company Linodes I manage, regular backups to the company backup server.

I use the Linode backup service together with other forms of backup. This way, I have an easy way to restore (Linode backup) along with always having my data - even if the whole dc go down.

_________________
lakridserne
Serverfruit - shared and managed VPS hosting, SSL certificates and domains
Awesome servers rented from Linode!

When you want to enable backups on a Linode, the following is displayed on the confirmation page:



The library article about the backup service explains it like:



The daily backup you want will never rotate into the weekly slot. It was destroyed when a new daily backup was taken. Only the daily backup taken on the weekly backup day will rotate into the weekly slot.

As an example, I have three automatic backups right now: May 5th, April 28th, and April 21st. Sunday is my weekly backup day, and May 5th (today!) is a Sunday. Yesterday, my daily backup was May 4th and my weekly backups were April 28th and April 21st. Tomorrow, my daily backup will be May 6th, my latest weekly backup will be May 5th, and my older weekly backup will be April 28th. The May 4th backup does not exist any more as of May 5th, but the May 5th backup will stick around until May 26th.

Myself, I generally use the Linode backup service for fast/easy full restores in the event of calamity (hardware failure, wrong buttons, etc). The huge advantage of it is the ability to do a full restore and be back online very quickly without a lot of fuss. For partial restores, or in the event Linode itself is AFU, I also use duplicity to back up stuff to S3. The full restoration process with duplicity is relatively terrible, but it's much nicer for partial and/or point-in-time restores.

tl;dr: Linode backup service is awesome at what it does, not so awesome at what it isn't designed to do. Things like duplicity are awesome at what Linode backup service isn't designed to do, but not so awesome at what Linode backup service does. If your data are important to you, use both.

_________________

/* TODO: need to add signature to posts */

Well, the consensus seems to be that it's a very basic no-frills service, and that I shouldn't expect much. In fact, I would venture to say it's one of those "you better hope you never need it, because it sucks" situations.

Thanks for all the comments online and offline. I think I'll just cancel it and move on to something else.

Does anyone have any good backup scripts they want to share? Debian 6 on my boxes.

thanks,
bruce

It doesn't suck, it does just what it says on the tin... It's an important part of an overall backup strategy, it's not a backup strategy unto itself.

For our part, we use the Linode backups as our first tier on-site backups. In case of emergency, our first step is to restore from our Linode backups, because that's the fastest approach; we can spin up a new Linode from our backup in a matter of minutes.

If that fails for whatever reason (Linode loses the whole datacenter, backup is corrupt, whatever), we go to our next tier. That involves nightly off-site incremental backup of non-system files. Every night, my home fileserver remotely initiates a MySQL dump and then rsyncs our linode to a local directory and takes a ZFS snapshot. If we need it, we deploy a new linode from the distro template and copy the data back from my fileserver. Takes longer, both because it involves some manual rebuilding and it's from a residential broadband connection (albeit one with 10 Mbps of upstream), but it's not that much work.

Our third tier, such as it is and what little there is of it, involves gathering up backups of individual chunks of data from various developer's personal machines to rebuild our infrastructure piece by piece. This sucks, and is a long and painful process. In fact, our having to execute it (when a previous VPS hosting provider took our servers on a literal road trip without informing us) and the pain it caused us (particularly since we had to do the rebuilding from the back of a van in the middle of a drive from Montreal to Toronto, a 6 hour trip) is what prompted us to put the first two tiers in place. There are now two far less painful procedures in place that we can use before we ever have to consider rebuilding from scratch like that again.

I also use the Linode backups as a first tier of a multi-tier solution on my main production nodes. It's definitely not the right approach if you want single file restorations or different backup time cycles than its fixed slots, but it's a nice safety net for my more critical nodes as a primary bare-metal (well, bare-VPS) restore option.

I've also found having backups enabled on a production node to be quite convenient for development/test purposes, since it essentially enables cloning the node without having to shut it down, either by using the most recent backup, or by making a snapshot right at the point you need to clone. To be honest, to date that's what all of my restorations through the backup system have been for.

Outside of Linode, for my part my primary backups are through a centralized bacula system (that I use for a wide variety of machines, both Linode and non-Linode) with backups stored on a local RAID box (the bacula director and storage agent runs right on the box). It's got a learning curve, but gives me complete centralized control over the individual backup cycles - individual machines get an agent installed. In my case I operate with fairly classic incremental, differential, and full backup cycles. This is almost always what I turn to for restoration, since in most cases it's a single file or small set of files I'm interested in, as opposed to a bare metal restore. It could also restore all local files on top of a new Linode template installation if needed.

-- David

BackupPC works wonderfully but if it's overkill for you then rsync with a small shell wrapper kicked off from cron might do what you want.

I use BackupPC, I'm very happy with it.

I'm currently using a headless install of crashplan to backup to my always on network storage at home.

What's wrong with rdiff-backup?

_________________
rsk, providing useless advice on the Internet since 2005.

No the backup service works exactly as documented and I have used it successfully.

I have encrypted backup of databases and filesystems in cloud storage and offline if I need to recover specific files or the whole of Linode goes up in flames. But it would take forever to restore an entire functioning server from them. When Fremont had one of its frequent power outages some time ago it corrupted one of my instances. I did a restore from backup to a different server and there was minimal downtime. IMO the Linode backups are for quick disaster recovery if a Linode instance shits itself and they do that really well. If you need something more fine grained you go to your other backups because you don't keep all your eggs in one Linode basket do you?

My primary backup strategy for the last many years has been rsync with the --link-dest option to create hard link-based snapshots. rsnapshot is a good wrapper around this.

But I'm hoping to make all that obsolete with a server backup service I've been working on. It'll have the simplicity of the Linode backup service but without the limitations. You'll be able to do a "bare metal" restore of an entire snapshot, or simply restore individual files. I should have a beta available in a couple months. If anyone wants to learn more or is interested in using the beta when it's available, send me an email or a PM. I'd also love to hear what features you'd want to see in an ideal server backup service.

3 Tiers.

o Linode Backup
o Daily tarball backup of specific important data areas (web trees, configure files etc).
o Duplicity Backup to my home office server.

Tarball keeps 3 days rotating. Good for when you fat finger something and need a quick restore of it or a number of files.

Duplicity in case I need to start over elsewhere and the DC is down.

Linode for restoring to another Linode or a major crash.

Each has their own strengths.

_________________
Kevin a.k.a. Dweeber

After reading this thread I think Linode backup service is overpriced. For that price I want to get full-featured backup, not only "better than nothing".

Update: I have finally found the (almost) perfect backup service, and it couldn't be easier to use with Linode (and another service I use that has droplets). It's here: http://www.opsmate.com

The install was super easy, and it immediately did a full backup of my Linode, and started doing differentials every night. I love that I can browse the web and view the snapshots, decide which to download (restore) and so on. There's also a very cool interactive FTP-like command line tool that I can use in the shell on my linode.

Although I haven't tried it yet, I can also mount the backups as a FUSE filesystem and do more advanced things such as diff'ing files and such.

Although it's still in beta right now, it's solid enough that I'm finally dropping linode's backup service. This is FAR better, and more in line with my expectations for being able to restore what's needed, when needed, as needed. You should check it out if you're still searching for a decent backup service.

Doing a happy dance...

Thanks,
Bruce