manticore, earlier sphinx search, has been rock solid for us for the past 16 years. now serving searches across nearly 300M short documents. we're using it in the old mode - where full index is re-created every 24h.
it's great to see that the project is alive and adding embeddings-related functions needed for semantic search.
aspect worth noting: up to my knowledge HE's tunnel will work only if you're assigned public IPv4 by your ISP. if you're behind a carrier grade NAT - too bad, you'll need to use another solution to get IPv6 to your home.
environment: KVM VMs running on physical hardware managed by us.
we have a belt & suspenders approach:
* backups of selected files / database dumps [ via dedicated tools like mysqldump or pg_dumpall ] from within VMs
* backups of whole VMs
backups of whole VMs are done by creating snapshot files via virsh snapshot-create-as, rsync followed by virsh blockcommit. this provides crash-consistant images of the whole virtual disks. we zero-fill virtual disks before each backup.
all types of backups later go to borg backup[1] [ kopia[2] would be fine as well ] deduplicated, compressed repository.
this approach is wasteful in terms of bandwidth, backup size but gives us peace of mind - even if we miss to take file-level backup of some folder - we'll have it in the VM-level backups.
Allegro has amazing metadata allowing you to precisely filter out the results. Search experience on amazon is an utter abomination compared to Allegro.
We're using BTRFS to host PostgreSQL and MySQL replication slaves. We're snapshoting drives holding data for both every 15 minutes, 1h, 8h and 12h and keep few snapshots for each frequency.
Those replicas are not used for any workload, besides nightly consistency checks for MySQLs via pt-table-checksum to ensure we don't have data drift.
Snapshots are crash consistent. Once in a while they give us ability to very quickly inspect how data looked like few minutes or hours ago. This can be life-saver in case of fat-fingering a production data and saved us from lenghty grepping of backups when we needed to recover few records from a specific table.
Yes, I know soft deletes, audit logs - all of those could help and we do have them, but sometimes that's not enough or not feasible.
Due to it's COW nature BTRFS is far from perfect for data that changes all the time [ databases busy with writes, images of VMs with plenty of disk write activity ]. There's plenty of write amplification, but that can be solved with NVMe drives thrown on the problem.
as far as i understand apparent death of sphinx and demand for continued development/support from big users of it led to creation of manticore.