HI, I’ve setup MIAB and have it working and local back ups turned on. I wanted to manually backup the encrypted files to an offline system (I don’t want to expose my large storage system to the internet).
I have he default local back up settings but it is not clear what a full back up means (I know, dumb), and what incremental exactly means. If I need to manually copy files backup, is it sufficient to only copy the latest “full” backup?
What is the minimum frequency of manual copy do I need to do, to restore in case of catastrophe?
Is it sufficient if I take the full copy once every 30 days? Does it depend on how “reliable” I think my VPS storage is? or does it depend on how much storage I have on my mail server VPS?
Nightly cron jobs run sometime after midnight. One of the tasks is the daily backup. The way the backup works is, it starts out with a full backup, then does incremental backups after that for some number of days (30 if memory serves). During the backup, the system is stopped so things aren’t changing. Full backups take longer than incremental, but incremental add to the total space needed for the backups, so it’s a tradeoff. We could do daily full backups, but then the system would be offline for a longer period. We could do 6 months of incremental, but the storage requirement would become quite large. I hope that sort clarifies why there are full and incremental backups.
As to making copies, you should always copy everything. I’m not even sure it would be possible to copy the full backup and leave the incremental backups behind, but even if you could it would mean everything that’s happened since the last full backup would be lost if you had to restore from backup.
I run a cron job that uses rsync to copy the backups every night about an hour after the nightly backup job runs on my MiaB. That way, if I lose to MiaB data, I can restore to its state from the night prior to the failure.
So, to answer your question, I would recommend copying the backup nightly, but you can adjust this to your own comfort level in terms of how much risk you’re willing to tolerate. But always copy the entire backup. Don’t try to copy it partially.
Thanks. That’s very helpful. Understand better now how they work.
I don’t want to expose my large storage system
For security, I do my backups in the other direction. Nothing gets reaches into the backup server, but the backup server can reach into (via rsync / ssh) my MIAB and extract a copy of the encrypted backups folder. That way my storage is not visible to the external world (touch wood).
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yep, that’s a good way, that’s what I was thinking of doing, since I already have SSH access into my VPS, I can reach in and pull out the files, but wanted to be be sure there are no gotchas, glad to know that works. Thanks again.
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