One word on modern backup strategy: encryption. Cloud services like CrashPlan take care of this automatically; traditional tape-backup solutions usually didn't, in the past.
I don't know anything about VMware-specific utilities (for VMs I just back up the instance like any other system, and make sure that I've got O/S configuration-management tools that allow me to regenerate an instance readily). But whatever utility you use, you should encrypt all backups. AES encryption no longer adds meaningful overhead to your operations; it's built-in to current-generation CPUs. Look for it in whatever utility you choose, and don't ignore it. Encryption-key management then becomes a separate backup issue, one that I haven't fully figured out. The keys need to be stored separately from the backups, and encryption-key backups need to be kept current so you don't wind up with an unrecoverable backup volume (whether it was stored in the cloud, on tape, or on local disks/USB/whatever). But as part of my figuring-out process, I'm leaning toward rotating the keys reasonably often so they're not out-of-sight/out-of-mind. They can be kept under git within a LUKS or TrueCrypt volume, to preserve history; or there might be other tools for doing this that I haven't yet discovered. My current solution is simple git-under-LUKS, on USB flash drives that can be stored in a vault, on your keychain, or wherever. -rich _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
