backup schedule on FSF machines

["Bradley M. Kuhn" <bkuhn at fsf dot org>]

RMS asked me to post some information on our backup schedule at the FSF to
this list.  I thought I had, but cleaning out an old folder reminded me
that I hadn't.

For all machines maintained by the FSF (includes gnudist, gnuftp,
subversions, etc.), an rsync happens each night from all disk space on
each given machine to a backup server behind the firwall at the FSF
offices.

Each week, the complete backup is run out to tape from this backup machine.
Tapes are kept for a few months, and one set from each month are kept
indefinitely.


We are currently working on a way to do daily incrementals off the rsyncs,
saving them to a different disk on the backup server.  That way, if a
machine, say, gets cracked and a lot of stuff is deleted, we'll have
reproducibility back to within 24 hours.  In some cases, we'd only have
reproducibility back 5 days without this new feature.

The feature should be added in the next few weeks.

   -- bkuhn

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