backups

[seth vidal]

After a super-fun-time debacle restoring a single file today I'd like
to talk about our backups a bit.

Right now our backups are:

  - bacula to a few central servers and then off to tape.

That seems like it is not scaling super-duper well for our size of disk
storage. It also seems like it is a wee bit cumbersome to use. :)

In the best of all possible infinite-money worlds I'd love to have
enough disk space to offer multiple snapshots of every filesystem
and/or a complete disk-to-disk copy with deduping (obnam) or with
reverse diffs (rdiff-backup). But let's assume that world is not likely
to exist and figure a few things out:


1. where are we backing up that we don't need to?

2. are there places that we can backup that really would benefit from
being a warmer-backup always available in a filesystem somewhere

3. Is there any good way to couple snapshots with our tape system to
make our backups a little simpler to deal with?

4. What level of bare metal-disaster-recovery do we actually HAVE with
our existing system and have we ever tested any of those cases? 

I do not know when I will get the time to put into fixing any of these
things up - but after today it is clearly on my list of things to think
about.

-sv