Q&A: How prominent a role should Time Travel play in your arsenal of Information Technologies?
- Very prominent
- Somewhat prominent
- Whatever…
Answer: Very prominent.
On-premises and in the cloud, Backups and snapshots let you travel back in time so that when things go wrong you can retrace your steps and chart a different course of events (e.g.: recover a document, a drive, or a healthy system state). OneDrive and Google drive have powerful revision management features.
With virtualization and containerization, it’s possible to travel to the future. You can test programs, updates, and miscellaneous changes in a sandbox before implementing them in production.
Virtualizations and backups can be combined. You can save copies of your Virtual Machines in the state in which they were yesterday, a month ago or years ago. Fifty at a time if necessary.
Within the perimeter of the network, our technologies of choice for travel back in time are Rsync, Rclone, Rsnapshot, and Acronis (among others).
For virtualization, we use Proxmox, a web-based hyper-converged infrastructure software running on KVM, the native Open Source Linux hypervisor. KVM is built into the Linux kernel, not another layer of possibly conflicting third-party middleware (like VMware®, Microsoft® Hyper-V, or Oracle® VirtualBox®). Google Cloud®, Amazon AWS®, IBM Cloud® and most of Microsoft Azure® and the Cloud industry run on KVM.