Airgapped sync job to rotating external drives – best practice?

[sj.k]

Hi all,

We currently have a PBS set up at our main location with a second PBS pulling a backup to a remote location. I would like to add airgapped backups for the worst case. I thought of having two external drives, that will be rotated and plugged into the main PBS weekly, auto mount/sync/eject with E-Mail notification when done. In other words, the person responsible should bring in the drive, connect it to the PBS, the PBS does its thing and once everything is done, the person receives an E-Mail notification and can collect the drive to take it with them again.

So far, I found I can create a removable Datastore on an external drive, make a sync job that triggers when that drive is connected and have it ejected upon completion. I think these options were added to the GUI in PBS v4 (?) – seems the process is now much easier than before!

But what about prune, GC and verify jobs? Is setting "Remove vanished" on the sync job and "Verify new snapshots" on the removable Datastore sufficient?

Thanks,
Sam

 

[Johannes S]

But what about prune, GC and verify jobs? Is setting "Remove vanished" on the sync job and "Verify new snapshots" on the removable Datastore sufficient?

Verify new snapshots won't cover reverify ( which you should do from time to time), a hook script to start a verify might work though ( not sure ). "Remote vanished" is a bad idea: Imagine some bad actor managed to prune your backups, then they will also be pruned on your external datastore.