Implementing a backup plan

Creating a solid backup plan is one of the most important things you’ll ever do as a server administrator. Even if you’re only using Ubuntu Server at home as a personal file server, backups are critical. During my career, I’ve seen disks fail many times. I often hear arguments about which hard disk manufacturer beats others in terms of longevity, but I’ve seen disk failures so often, I don’t trust any of them. All disks will fail eventually, it’s just a matter of when. And when they do fail, they’ll usually fail hard with no easy way to recover data from them. A sound approach to managing data is that any disk or server can fail, and it won’t matter, since you’ll be able to regenerate your data from other sources, such as a backup or secondary server.

There’s no one best backup solution, since it all depends on what kind of data you need to secure, and what software and hardware resources...