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I Nearly Lost All of My Data

kevq.uk

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Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#102
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s on-site way too often for my tastes. If your house burns down while your car is in the garage, there’s a good chance you’ll lose the backup too. Adding a computer in your office fixes that, but why not just send your backups to it over the internet instead of using this ad-box vehicular transport protocol?

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes travelling down the highway...

Initial seeding of your offsite backup over the Internet would be a pain, but most people's valuable data change rate isn't high enough to significantly tax modern broadband connections. I sync a few gigs of data a week and I never even notice it happen.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#103

There isn't really a good excuse not to have an offsite backup, especially when services like back blaze are $5 a month. Also ... RAID is not a backup.

Backblaze is great. But their desktop backup solution for $5/month is not available beyond Windows and MacOS. Their B2 storage is via duplicity, but that quickly exceeds $5/month with typical storage cases.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#105
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is hooked up to a USB battery pack, which in turn is plugged into the accessory port on the car. The hard drive powers down after the data transfer is finished. All data is encrypted before sending to it. If it gets stolen, well it is only one of the copies of the data (however it lives hidden under the dash, and is small enough that it looks like a piece of car equipment).

Do you ever worry about the Li-Ion pack having issues in the hot car?

I've never specifically used a Li-Ion pack in my car PC setup, storing it in the heat would worry me a bit, but surprisingly, operational temps in a car aren't bad: If he's using it after he drives it, the car has likely been cooled or heated for driver comfort, and it'll take time after he parks for the temperature in the car to return to "outdoor" levels.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#106
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.

I use Arq to backup, and it’s a lovely little program that isn’t a resource hog, and handles the encryption. I use it to back everything up, a copy to a removable drive, a copy that gets updated every day online, and another once a month online on a seperate server. It seems to work well, and it really is painless,after the initial seeding.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#107

Over Christmas, I backed up all my stuff to a 3TB external hard drive that I took with me when I visited my parents and intentionally left the drive on a shelf at their house. This is what I call a poor man's offsite backup.

I assume you either told them what it is or are reasonably confident they won't throw away the random thing on their shelf that neither of them know about.

I've seen a few cold backup setups like this, but I would both worry about the significant gap in coverage between the drive you left at Christmas and next time you update your backups. And also the shelf life of mechanical hard drives not in operation is poor.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#109

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…

> Sounds like backups were shut off 6 months prior.

Exactly. Onsite backup is not a backup, especially if it is directly connected to the primary data store.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#110
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…

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