Don’t Wanna Pay Ransom Gangs? Test Your Backups

Re:Don’t Wanna Pay Ransom Gangs? Test Your Backups by TheDong on Monday July 19, 2021 @06:33PM (#27888052)

The main reason I think this normally isn't done is that it requires downtime to do safely most of the time.

In order to not lose data, you can't have any writes between the time when the backup was taken and the present, or you need code which reconciles additional state and adds it onto the backup before switching over.

Normally, backup restoration is done during a maintenance window where the site is disabled so no writes can happen, and then usually a window of writes are lost anyway (i.e. 'last X hours, since the backup was taken')

For your use-case, do you just have very few writes? Do you lose writes? Do you have some other clever strategy to deal with it?

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Re:Don’t Wanna Pay Ransom Gangs? Test Your Backups by dragontamer on Monday July 19, 2021 @06:40PM (#27888112)

It should be noted that not everyone is a global company.

A typical bank / credit union may only serve one town. As such, it would be socially acceptable to designate 3am to 4am as a regular maintenance window where services are shutdown.

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Re:Don’t Wanna Pay Ransom Gangs? Test Your Backups by Waterluvian on Monday July 19, 2021 @06:42PM (#27888123)

Good point. The 5 minutes of downtime is simply tolerated. My captive audience are dozens of humans and thousands of robots all willing to try again.

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Re:Don’t Wanna Pay Ransom Gangs? Test Your Backups by mlac on Monday July 19, 2021 @07:10PM (#27888325)

Ticketmaster?

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