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Old 13th May 2009
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jggimi jggimi is online now
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: USA
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"Offsite" backup is critical. You could easily lose data on a single hard drive, and vermaden mentions RAID protection ... but that would not prevent data loss in the event of a loss of the RAID array -- fire/flood/earthquake/EMP/theft/you-name-it.

You might consider daily incrementals -- so that you could restore to "Wednesday" if necessary, on Saturday. Example: Monthly 0, Weekly 1, Dailies use 2-7.

On the fly compression of your backups will save disk space, locally.

You need not necessarily require a 3rd party package for encryption, depending on need. If you want to encrypt data for transit on an insecure network to secure storage, ssh(1) works fine. If you need to store the data in encrypted form, openssl(1) is also available.

Note that neither openssl nor ssh are directly available from the ramdisk kernel, so you might need alternative procedures for disaster recovery. NFS isn't available from the ramdisk kernel, either.

There are lots of ways to manage DR without live media; one common method is to install OpenBSD on a USB stick, and boot that instead of the ramdisk kernel. Another is to use the ramdisk kernel to restore / and /usr using "traditional" methods and media, then chroot into the restored environment to run nc, ssh, or other tools you might need to restore encrypted or network connected data. Yet another option is to do a re-install of the OS, then restore /usr/local, /var, /home, and /etc once you've booted the system. Live media is an option, also. See the FAQ in my link, below.

I happen to use dump with piped compression and transmission via ssh to my backup server. The data is stored offline on DVD+RW, using sysutils/shunt on the backup server.
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