I Nearly Lost All of My Data • Hacker News Board

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#11

Post by linsomniac » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 10:36 PM UTC

Kudos to Synology for having a process to recover on a Linux box if the Synology box craps the bed. I was reading this story thinking "this is a good lesson on why you don't buy an expensive SAN, unless you can afford to buy two".

But, the other lesson is: Backups. Sounds like backups were shut off 6 months prior.

The other lesson is: Monitoring. Backups were going to the USB drive, but it that stopped working at some point. Unless you have some tested monitoring of your backups, you are likely to lose data.

Glad this story had a happy ending.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#12

Post by Introvertuous » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 10:36 PM UTC

x220 wrote: post #6

>I don’t know what happened for sure, but I think it may have been a power surge that fried the boards on both the Synology and the USB, as they were plugged in to the same socket. He didn't have a surge protector? Sweet Jesus. I don't plug my backed-up PC into anything not surge protected.

I wouldn't plug any PC into anything not surge protected...

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#13

Post by derekp7 » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 10:37 PM UTC

The best solution I found as an alternative to an off-site copy is to set up a USB drive and something like a Raspberry Pi in my car. When I pull into the garage, the house server senses it and syncs new data to it.

This can be supplemented further by having it auto sync to a computer in your office whenever you pull into work. Add in some monitoring so you can get a phone alert if any of the synced copies are more than a few days out of date, and you are almost golden.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#14

Post by justwalt » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 10:38 PM UTC

derekp7 wrote: post #13

The best solution I found as an alternative to an off-site copy is to set up a USB drive and something like a Raspberry Pi in my car. When I pull into the garage, the house server senses it and syncs new data to it. This can be supplemented further by having it auto sync to a computer in your office whenever you pull into work. Add in some monitoring so you can get a phone alert if any of the synced copies are more t…

That's a really cool solution.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#15

Post by Havoc » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 10:39 PM UTC

After thinking about this kind of data apocalypse for a bit I realised that the portion of my data that is mission critical is actually really small.

Throwing it on multiple clouds with version history isn't an issue.

(I'd recommend an O365 sub + duplicati...in theory you can push like 5TB to MS cloud).

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#16

Post by zbuf » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 10:43 PM UTC

I had a similar experience with a relative's Seagate NAS.

Except the ext filesystem was unreadable because it used a different page size. Required some shenanigans in userland by thankfully I was able to recover the data. Seemed like a software fault on the box.

The chassis had to be destroyed to remove the drive and it was interesting to see the warranty explicitly mention the customer was allowed to do this to recover their data.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#17

Post by Karunamon » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 10:44 PM UTC

linsomniac wrote: post #11

Kudos to Synology for having a process to recover on a Linux box if the Synology box craps the bed. I was reading this story thinking "this is a good lesson on why you don't buy an expensive SAN, unless you can afford to buy two". But, the other lesson is: Backups. Sounds like backups were shut off 6 months prior. The other lesson is: Monitoring. Backups were going to the USB drive, but it that stopped working at som…

The nice thing about Synology storage stuff is that it's a nice GUI (seriously, they're about the only company I can think of that's doing appliance management right) on top of standard and battle-tested open source tools.

This was one of the reasons I was okay with paying their prices. Even if the device completely craps the bed, I'll be able to hook the drives containing absolutely normal LVM/btrfs volumes up to another machine and get my data out.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#18

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 10:50 PM UTC

Couple of observations.

First of all, given the price of storage, for backups, I don’t think anything other than mirroring makes sense. Just get 2 big hard drives for your NAS and set them up for mirroring. In the event of a filmier, you can read directly.

Next, you don’t have a full backup without offsite storage. Even if it wasn’t a power surge, there could be flooding or fire at a single location.

Always remember the basic 3 2 1 rule!

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#19

Post by chrsstrm » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 10:50 PM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #15

After thinking about this kind of data apocalypse for a bit I realised that the portion of my data that is mission critical is actually really small. Throwing it on multiple clouds with version history isn't an issue. (I'd recommend an O365 sub + duplicati...in theory you can push like 5TB to MS cloud).

And here's your recurring reminder that all cloud storage services fingerprint your uploaded files looking for TOS violations. If you haven't encrypted your backups first you are at the will of the service you are using.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#20

Post by lettergram » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 10:53 PM UTC

That’s part of the reason I keep my personal data backed up two two sets of NAS. In addition, it’s mapped as a Dropbox drive on one of them.

From my families perspective it’s just one drive, but it’s replicated everywhere.