Hey, what process do you use for backups?

I screwed up, royally...

I use rsync -raz --partial --delete --log-file

I liked delete since it maintains the backup and deletes files that I delete from the source.  

I had a hard drive start to fail about six months ago, it was my music library.  After I did some patching and updated a new kernel then rebooted, I just didn't check for a few days and that drive didn't mount.  I thought oh shit, but was able to mount it manually.  I was thinking it just didn't spin up in time and just wasn't available.  But restarting the server a few times and it was all good, no issues with that drive.  I checked the backup logs and because it wasn't mounted the backup skipped over all of that media and left it alone.  Ok cool, I thought.  If/when the drive fails I'll be ok...

until....

It failed again on the 16th.  I usually only notice it when I try to stream some music and that's usually just when I'm driving.  So I check in on everything and that drive had a catastrophic failure, it's dead... dead... dead...  Never coming back.  Ok, no issues, I'll just order a new drive and restore, until I check the backup and all of that media is gone.  Looking at the logs it saw the empty html folder (that, the subfolders for subsonic and plex, and the music were all on that failed drive) and deleted the backup.  Oh crap...  

So now, I'm not sure how rsync works and determines it should delete or not.  The first time it left everything alone, maybe because the drive was there but it just wasn't mounted?  But when it failed completely the mount point was truly empty and so guh-bye...

Anyway, I'm just curious.  What process are you using to backup your server?

Just testing because even though I upgraded Python and did an initial check, when I came back later I was getting a bunch of errors at the top of the screen. I down/upgraded to a lesser version and it appears to be working. But who knows.... (everything has been backed up)

Here, have a random image...

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A while ago I was getting idiot spammers creating accounts to post their stupid links. I then removed the automatic approval to admin approval. It was annoying to say the least. So then I just started banning them. So far so good. I haven't had any new users in a while.

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I believe this to be true.

So I updated the web server's PHP version and that caused a serious problem with the old forum software. Since I didn't want to revert back to the old version of PHP I decided to scramble and set up a new forum with a more up-to-date software package.

This took a little longer than expected since there's a ton of freaking options to go through.

Anyway, luckily I had the old forum stuff backed up because I plan on restoring the old random image thread in the next couple of days. And then I'll see if there'll be a way to merge the new one. Otherwise I'll just let the 3rd iteration continue on its own.

Hey kids...it's that time again! I'll kick this one off with one of my favorites:

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