I was fortunate. Yesterday, after the system problem, I was unable to access my site. Fortunately, it was a new project. I had just completed an install if InvisionBoard and related applications.

I tried everything I could think of to regain access to the board with no luck.

No problem! I have the beta backup service. (I know, it is a beta)

I tried every conceivable thing to recover with the backup service, the new daily backup, the 3 day old weekly backup, and the 10 day old snapshot. All of them failed.

I would like to know what went wrong. Were the backup snapshots compromised by the system problem? Was my procedure incorrect? I just clicked on the appropriate restore button. I even tried deleting all of the existing images. I only use about half of the available disk space for my image as well.

I'm not complaining at all. I have completely recovered the new site via other means and it is fully operational with a new install of CentOS 5.3.

I would just like to know what I should have done to utilize the backup service for its intended purpose. This was one of those opportune learning experiences!

Thank you,
Jeff

I had a similar experience yesterday. Luckily it was not a disk I couldn't easily regenerate. I just ran a test restore today from today's backups (to spare space) and two failed with jobs 1515789 and 1515792. I'll leave the disks in place for potential research, but will delete them tomorrow.

So the backup service is unreliable....good to know *sigh*....

It's a Backup service BETA. Remember?

Beta does not mean broken....which apparently this is.

Beta does mean it may not work 100% of the time. Which seems to fit the issues described.

No....lets do it this way, did anyone have a successful restore after the mass outage?

If we are talking less then a %90 recovery rate then it isn't beta, its broken.

It can be both broken and beta but as long as it has the beta tag then there isn't really much to complain about since everyone knew up front that it isnt production ready and may not function as expected or at all.

I'm a Linoder and have a Linux backup program in beta, if you want to try it. It will create compressed and encrypted backups to a local disk and can then send it to Amazon S3 or to a remote FTP/SSH/rsync/IMAP (email) server.

I think the Linode backup does image backups, which is useful for recovering after really hosing your system. HashBackup does "always incremental" file backups, so it's fast. It has easy file retention settings, like "keep the last 7 days, last 4 weeks, and last 3 months of backups".

I've tested it on about 5 different Linode distributions, with no problems. It's statically linked, so basically, you just download it and execute it, and it'll work no matter what kind of stuff you do or don't have installed on your Linode.

Send me some comments if you try it: prirun at gmail.com

Jim

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HashBackup: Easy Linux backups, local and offsite
http://sites.google.com/site/hashbackup

It looks interesting.

I'm going to take a look.

Jeff

I have a script that takes my important data, tars it, bzips it, encrypts it, then cuts it into 25MB chunks and sends them to a few Gmail accounts. Works rather well for the past 2 years.

Right, and everyone should have something like that for their data, because beta backup is not offsite. The beta backup really offers a system backup. The strength of the beta backup service is that you can restore the entire server with just a couple clicks. The beta backup is insurance against my own stupidity when I delete/upgrade some critical file and it won't boot anymore, or I get compromised.