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'll 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. Later on in this chapter, we'll look at a few data recovery tricks, but honestly, if you need to recover data from a failed disk, your approach is already wrong. A sound approach to managing data is such 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...