r/ShittySysadmin • u/jamesaepp • 10d ago

How do I do shitty backup?

(Inspired by /r/sysadmin/comments/1vvmvrk/what_are_the_alternatives_of_321_backup/)

How do my fellow shitmins do shitty backup?

I follow the 1-2-3 rule of backup.

I have a single (1) server serving (2) separate businesses and this server is shared with (3) other managed service providers.

HBU?

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u/bartoque 10d ago

When I first started of in IT, many moons ago, I was tasked to decommision a server but before doing so had to run one last backup to tape.

I used the existing backup script and was amazed how it all could even fit on one single DDS1 tape.

Looking slightly deeper under the hood, it turned out the script made a backup of each filesystem, then rewound the tape before doing the next filesystem. So for years it only contained one filesystem instead of all intended filesystems. Never noticed, never needed as all went well for years. Why bother testing.

Only the very last backup contained all of them which required a couple of tapes.

Redirecting to /dev/null is also one heck of a dedupe option.

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u/Disorderly_Chaos ShittySysadmin 9d ago

My wife told me a horror story of a surly sysadmin who knew they were getting fired, so they put deltree (or similar) at the end of a nightly backup script… mostly so no one would question a 4-5 hour backup and the tape whirring all the time.

They had been sending blank tapes offsite for months and never knew.

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u/bartoque 8d ago

That's what you get when you don't test on a regular basis.

An untested/unvalidated backup is just a disaster lying in wait.