Klara

Webinar Overview

ON DEMAND

Klara co-founder Allan Jude teams up with Colin Percival, founder of Tarsnap and FreeBSD release engineer, explore the essentials of backups. Together, they uncover game-changing best practices for building a successful disaster recovery plan!

Learn about the most commonly encountered pitfalls when creating backups and how to address them using ZFS. We’ll share stories of what happens when your DR plans fail to consider the unique aspects and requirements of your infrastructure. Join us live! 

Your takeaways after the webinar:

  • How to create internally consistent backups of live systems and applications.
  • Deciding what parts of a system to backup vs recreate.
  • No amount of RAID or erasure coding is a replacement for backups.
  • Tips for monitoring and testing backups. 

Top Burning Questions from the Session—Answered!

We handpicked two of the most thought-provoking questions from the session, with expert answers from the panel:

🗨️ If I replicate snapshots to another device and retain them for a period of time, does that count as a backup?
      Snapshots on a local machine do not constitute a backup. However, if you are replicating the snapshots to another machine, and retaining a sufficient number of them to be back to restore files from different points in time, then that does qualify as a proper backup.

🗨️ Do you think tape still has a place in backups?
      Tapes may still have a place, but many of their advantages have faded over time. Online backups with HDDs are often more performant and allow faster restoration. Tapes also require more manual intervention, even with tape robots, which can lead to issues.    

🗨️ Would you recommend the same RAID-Z level for a backup server? What are the reliability considerations for a backup server?
      This depends a lot on the situation. You want to ensure the backup has enough redundancy to stay online, as new backups can't be created while the backup host is offline, and restores become impossible. The aim is often for the backup to have a higher capacity than the primary server to retain more backups, so sometimes that does mean a lower redundancy level makes sense. You also need to consider performance, the primary server often uses a layout focused on IOPS, while the backup server is focused on throughput and capacity.

 

Date: February 13th, 2025
Time: 1:00 PM EST
Duration: 45 minutes.
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Meet the Hosts

Principal Solutions Architect and co-Founder of Klara Inc., Allan Jude has been on the team since the beginning. Shepherding an amazing team of developers and sysadmins, he is the technical heart of our team. A community go-to person for ZFS and open source through and through, Allan enjoys spending his time improving on ZFS, FreeBSD and making open source code better.

Learn About Klara

Colin Percival is the founder of Tarsnap, a secure online backup service. He is also a former FreeBSD Security Officer and the creator of the scrypt key derivation function, and is currently the FreeBSD release engineering lead and maintainer of the FreeBSD/EC2 platform.