Lessons from the Debian compromise: backups.

Posted Dec 13, 2003 18:57 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: Lessons from the Debian compromise: backups. by hensema
Parent article: Lessons from the Debian compromise

And more than one copy too. Most people keep one copy of everything, just as protection in case a disk breaks or gets suddenly wiped out. So your backup contains the cracked version of your files.

But what you really need to protect you from a crack, or various other forms of losses, is a multilevel rotation scheme. Have one copy from last night, but also a copy from each of the last 7 nights, and one copy from each of the last 7 weeks, and one copy from each of the last 49 weeks, etc.

That way, when you find out that someone put a backdoor in your system a few weeks ago, you can restore the original files (which probably hadn't changed for years before that).