Also, script disaster recovery too. Script it when creating your backup procedure (not at the time of disaster), use the script to test your procedure, and do it often.
This way, when your script fails, you can recover quickly.
I'd expand this to actually take the time to implement (or make yourself) a system to automate said backups and maybe even testing them automagically. You'll probably end up using the same set of scripts for all your beginning projects and it'll be worth having.
Just a backup script for Linux - bummed it together with some googling:
Designed for overnight backup, hook up a backup drive in the afternoon one day, and put in safe the next morning.
Script mounts and verifies existence of a backup external hdd; creates a backup tar on the drive; deletes all but the last five recent backup archives; then unmounts drive for removal next morning.
I could be wrong, but its something along the lines of...
You have 500gb of files at t0, that gets backed up as Backup1.backup, then you download a 15kb text file and kick off another backup. Instead of completely regenerating a backup of all the data, it will instead recreate a new Backup snapshot, but it will still use that original Backup1.backup file and then have some data structure in place that allows you to just incrementally backup the new data while still preserving the integrity of the old files and the integrity of the previous snapshot.
Author here. We'd love this to be a thing, but this is young software, so we don't recommend relying on this as a single way of doing a backup for now. Bear in mind that our main use case is for things that you can reproduce in principle (builds of a commit history, see manyclangs).
This looks like it could be really nice for duplicating backups into a separate bucket with more severely locked-down access, to alleviate concerns about things like a disgruntled employee blowing away a backups bucket.
Not the parent, but my homebrew backup script first makes the backup and then attempts to restore a canary file. If that fails it raises the alarm.
It's not perfect. I can imagine a scenario where the canary is restorable, but some other important files aren't. However it certainly protects against cases where a bug in the backup software makes a completely unreadable snapshot (which has happened to me before).
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