Feels weird to talk about strategy for your backups without mentioning RPO, RTO, or even RCO - even though some of those concepts are nudged up against in TFA.
Those terms are handy for anyone not familiar with the space to go do some further googling.
Also odd to not note the distinction between backups and archives - at least in terms, of what users' expectations are around the two terms / features - or even mention archiving.
(How fast can I get back to the most recent fully-functional state, vs how can I recover a file I was working on last Tuesday but deleted last Wednesday.)
> without mentioning RPO, RTO, or even RCO
> Those terms are handy for anyone not familiar with the space to go do some further googling.
You should probably get people started
RPO: Recovery Point Objective
RTO: Recovery Time Objective
RCo: Recovery Consistency
I'm pretty sure they aren't mentioned because these aren't really necessary for doing self-hosted backups. Do we really care much about how fast we recover files? Probably not. At least not more than that they exist and we can restore them. For a business, yeah, recovery time is critical as that's dollars lost.
FWIW, I didn't know these terms until you mentioned them, so I'm not an expert. Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding or being foolishly naive (very likely considering the previous statement). But as I'm only in charge of personal backups, should I really care about this stuff? My priorities are that I have backups and that I can restore. A long running rsync is really not a big issue. At least not for me.
Fair that I should have spelled them out, though my point was that TFA touched on some of the considerations that are covered by those fundamental and well known concepts / terms.
Knowing the jargon for a space makes it easier to find more topical information. Searching on those abbreviations would be sufficient, anyway.
TFA talks about the right questions to consider when planning backups (but not archives) - eg 'What downtime can I tolerate in case of data loss?' (that's your RTO, effectively).
I'd argue the concepts encapsulated in those TLAs - even if they sound a bit enterprisey - are important for planning your backups, with 'self-hosted' not being an exception per se, just having different numbers.
Sure, as you say 'Do we really care about how fast we recover files?' - perhaps you don't need things back in an hour, but you do have an opinion about how long that should take, don't you?
You also ask 'should I really care about this stuff?'
I can't answer that for you, other than turn it back to 'What losses are you happy to tolerate, and what costs / effort are you willing to incur to mitigate?'. (That'll give you a rough intersection of two lines on your graph.)
This pithy aphorism exists for a good reason : )
> There are two types of people: those who have lost data,
> and those who do backups.
Those terms are handy for anyone not familiar with the space to go do some further googling.
Also odd to not note the distinction between backups and archives - at least in terms, of what users' expectations are around the two terms / features - or even mention archiving.
(How fast can I get back to the most recent fully-functional state, vs how can I recover a file I was working on last Tuesday but deleted last Wednesday.)