Ask HN: How do you backup your systems?

Mostly using the application-specific backup tool (pgdump, mongodump, etc) to S3. For system configuration it's all in Chef, so I backup chef.

For a few flat file tools I just tar up the directory and upload that.

Sometimes, I just take AWS volume snapshots. That'll get the whole data or / partition, which also lets me instant restore the machine, or attach the data partition to a newly built machine.

I boot into backup cycle:

I have a host running DHCP, TFTP, NFS and Linux containers. Every system I install in my intranet is first created on this host. Its then booted over PXE, to sync itself to disc. The crontab contains a sync back to the NFS server every night. And the server is doing incremental backup of them all using cpio to USB discs.

I have 3 packs backup discs. One where the active is attached, one in the shelf, and one at a neighbor. Those 3 packs rotate every week. I handle backup in my company the same, beside that 2nd storage is carried home by the boss, and 3rd storage is a bank locker.

We use a Synology running their proprietary RAID thing, with a hot spare. It's connected to fiber as central backup hub for all machines through read-only BitTorrent Sync. It's also functions as our Git Server. Next to that we have two remote backup sites for the most recent terabytes, and all Mac's have Time Machines running at home...

And of course everyone has a Time Machine as a fallback at home for their production machines.

rsnapshot (http://www.rsnapshot.org/) running on a Linux machine with three 2T WD red's in RAID5 config using md. LVM sitting on top of the RAID5 to allow parceling out space as needed. One of the LVM partitions is the rsnapshot backup tree.

Cron setup on the backup server to take nightly rsnapshots of the machines that get backed up. The only machine that does not get nightly's is my laptop, as it is often hibernating overnight, so it gets periodic pushes when it is not hibernating.

Occasional rsync of the rsnapshot tree to an offsite location.

Of course it helps that I have zero mswin machines.