Best Method of Backing Up a Linux Server

[Tim Stutzman]

Hi,

New to Linux so some advice would be appreciated...

Use case is one Linux physical server running CentOs 7.  We are running a company critical application on it.  The application's database is a flat file structure.  Minimally, I need to back up the flat files once a day ~2 GB (I was thinking of backing them up to a NAS or another storage device).  Since it is not virtualized, not sure if there are anymore options than just backing up the data, but wanted to see if there are more advance options that would decrease downtime for disaster recovery.

What backup software do you guys recommend?

Are there any backup solutions that possibly take an image of the physical drives instead of just a file backup thus make it easier/faster to recover and decrease downtime?

Thanks in advanced

[Hippy Nerd]

I like tar.

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[Adam Layne]

I'd use duplicity and off-site storage instead of NAS. tar and NAS will be faster to restore from if someone rms the database, but not if the building floods.

[Stead Halstead]

Hi Tim!

I do the following:

- Use cron to do a backup of important files and databases at whatever frequency needed. I store these locally. The cron also has a command that deletes files after a few days.

- We have a Unitrends backup appliance that backs up the entire disk once or so a day, so we're covered if the Linux server toasts.

- We archive to disk from Unitrends weekly and at archive lives in my office, opposite side of campus from the server room.

-Once a month, we ship one of those archive disks offsite with Docutrak.

It's been working well for us. Thankfully any restores I've done have been from the local directory, but I think this would set us up pretty well for more. I have restore steps typed in our wiki, and I try to review these every once in a while.

Also, for virtualized servers, you can check out Veeam or Unitrends. Depending on your Hypervisor, they can do a point in time VM restore for the whole VM that would cover you if you needed to get back up fast and someone deleted the VM. Does anyone know if any open source tools are out there that can do this? 

Thanks! I'm open to feedback on this process from others too!

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Stead Halstead