On 6/7/2011 2:34 PM, Timothy J Massey wrote:
>
>  > While the typical use would be to revive the latest copy after some sort
>  > of disaster, I wouldn't rule out wanting older versions too. For
>  > example if you had a security intrusion or an update-gone-wrong, you
>  > might want to back out to something older and known-good.
>
> Have you actually used virtualization?

Yes, of course - doesn't everyone...

> This sounds OK in theory, but not
> in practice! :)
>
> That is what live snapshots are for.

I like my backups to serve double-duty.  That is, to cover both 
host/disk issues and any form of file corruption/deletion.  VM-managed 
snapshots don't.

> How long are you going to want to
> go back? Trust me, if you don't want to go back within a few hours, you
> are *NOT* going to want to go back even days later. In which case, your
> aged backups are *USELESS*.

Not true.  I've had reasons to use both virtual and physical disk image 
backups that were years old.  The trick is to not store data in the same 
place as the programs.

> With virtualization, not everything needs to be fixed by the BackupPC
> (or any other backup) hammer. That's the fun of having all those extra
> layers between the OS and the hardware! :) (And if you have real SAN
> hardware, it can get *really* fun: can you say thin-on-thin
> provisioning? It's like shorting stocks on margin! :) )

Sure, but would you rather pay for a remote-sync SAN with snapshots or a 
box running backuppc somewhere?   But that brings up a slightly related 
topic: has anyone looked at the recent freeNAS beta to see if its remote 
replication would work for a backuppc archive (as in zfs snapshot 
incrementals...)?

-- 
    Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell AT gmail DOT com

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