[gustavorg]

Why would you back up the server?

Because the rule number one of the programmers club, is backup everything, everywhere, all the time, if you don't remember do it again, and if you're sure you have enough backups do it again anyway. I even do backup of my backups everyday (in pendrives, in cds, in ancient scrolls, etc)

[wetpaste]

In the age of treating servers (or containers) like cattle instead of pets, the "Back up everything" mantra has fallen by the wayside. In order to get away with selective backups you have to know exactly where long-term state is stored and you need to have the infrastructure in place to manage re-provisioning everything and restoring snapshots. It's not something you can tack on later. Iterate, test, integrate, document, audit, review. It ends up being much more complicated than periodic wholesale snapshots on a server.

There's a certain elegance and assurance you get from this that has been lost with the times, akin to how monolithic server software with all functionality natively available in the code has gone away in favor of microservices. Now you have message queues, k/v stores, caches, search engines as a microservices that are tacked on to the core services and rarely fully understood by the engineering team and containing more functionality than the codebase ever really utilizes. Ends up being more complicated in manage in a lot of ways. I think the emergence of microservices is one of the driving forces behind selective state backups, because you can never back up the entire state at once, everything is too spread out. You're not going to back up the running state of the k8s node, or whatever

[LanceH]

It's more "make everything restorable" rather than "back up everything."