Thank you for sharing

Ha. That quote made me chuckle; it reminded me of a performance by the band Alice in Chains, where a similar quote appeared. Re: BCDR solutions, they also sell trust among B2B companies. Collectively, these solutions protect billions, if not trillions of dollars worth of data, and no CTO in their right mind would ever allow an open-source approach to backup and recovery. This is primarily also due to the fact that backups need to be highly available. Scrolling through a snapshot list is one of the most tedious tasks I've had to do as a sysadmin. Although most of these solutions are bloated and violate userspace like nobody's business, it is ultimately the company's reputation that allows them to sell products. Although I respect Proxmox's attempt at cornering the Broadcom fallout, I could go at length about why it may not be able to permeate the B2B market, but it boils down to a simple …

> having backups in multiple places (3-2-1 backup!) is important Yeah and for the vast majority of individual cybernauts, that "1" is almost unachievable without paying for a backup service. And at that point, why are you doing any of it yourself instead of just running their rolling backup + snapshot app? There isn't a person in the world who lives in a different city from me (that "1" isn't protection when there's a tornado or flood or wildfire) that I'd ask to run a computer 24/7 and do maintenance on it when it breaks down.

> You should never trust an "rsync copy" or even crash consistent backups. This leads you to the secret forbidden knowledge that you only need to back up your database(s) and file/object storage. Everything else can be, or has to be depending on how strong that 'never' is, recreated from your provisioning tools. All those Veeam VM backups some IT folks hoard like dragons are worthless.

3-2-1 analogy is old. We have infinite flexibility on where we can put data unlike before cloud servers existed. I'd at least have file system snapshots locally for easy recovery in case of manual mistakes, have it copied at a remote location using implementation A and let it snapshot there too, copy same amount on another location using implementation B and let it snapshot there too, so not only you'd have durability, implementation bugs on a backup process can also be mitigated. zfs is a godsend for this and I use Borg as secondary implementation, which seems enough for almost any disasters.

My personal external backup is two external drives in RAID1 (RAID0 wtfff?). One already failed, of course the Seagate one. It failed silently , too - a few sectors just do not respond to read commands and this was discovered when in-place encrypting the array. (I normally would avoid Seagate consumer drives if it wasn't for brand diversity. Now I have two WD drives purchased years apart.) It's a home backup so not exactly relevant to most of what you said - just wanted to underscore the point about storage media sucking. Ideally I'd periodically scrub each drives independently (can probably be done by forcing a degraded array mode, but careful not to mess up the metadata!) against checksums made by backup software. This particular failure mode could also be caught by dd'ing to /dev/null.