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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

#181

Post by m3nu »

techload wrote: post #177
m3nu wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's also mention Vorta, an open source GUI for Borg to make it as easy to use as commercial backup tools. We just started translating into different languages. All input and PRs are welcome. https://github.com/borgbase/vorta/ (I'm the original author, but Thomas, the current Borg maintainer is also very active.)

Any plans to have a Windows client of Vorta? [Edit: Saw it now: "Windows is currently not supported by Borg, but this may change in the future."]

Vorta can run on Windows (it's in Qt), but Borg can't (for now). They are working on it though.[1]

You could probably run it today using the Windows 10 Linux subsystem, but it's not fully tested and will need some small fixes. Maybe later this year.

If anyone is interested in working on this platform, just post at [1]. It's probably very doable.

1: https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/issues/936

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#182

Post by distances »

fro0116 wrote: post #137

I currently have way to much data lying around for any metered cloud storage to be economical, so I'm currently subscribing to both Backblaze and Crashplan for their unlimited storage backup plans. Crashplan killed off their consumer plan a while ago, so I ended up moving to their business plan at double the price. In my case even at that price it was still worth it considering the amount of storage I'm using. Anyone…

Crashplan ending their consumer product was such a shame. As far as I know it was the only consumer product supporting Linux. I am currently on their discounted business plan, but I still have no idea what to do after that discount runs out.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#183

Post by Farradfahren »

The best thing i found to enforce backup discipline on myself is to regularly migrate between machines- who are regularly offline for more then 4 hours.

You will have mostly current backups of your projectdata and workdata on all those machines you migrate from and towards.

The problem theire then becomes destructive automation. You must avoid automating syncs with half-corrupted or full-corrupted instances of your work environment.

Also backups. Always backups.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#184

Post by mrweasel »

ams6110 wrote: post #95

If you have 4TB of data saved at home you are a hoarder. Why do you have that much stuff. I don't have any data at home that I would miss very much if I lost it.

I was wondering the same thing. I don't think the average person have terabytes or even gigabytes of data stored at home. Every time I start a project I make a remote git repo. Music and photos are handled by cloud services... Not that I have photos I really care about, but I'm sure other people do. Documents and configuration files are backup up using Tarsnap, but that's 100Mb at the most.

We had a similar debate at work, where I questioned the need for backup of my workstation, arguing that there's nothing on it that's not also in git, on a network share, in LastPass or the mail server. Apparently only two people out of a hundred, me and the CEO, do have important stuff stored solely on our workstations.

Calling people with 4Tb of data hoarders may be a little unnecessary, but I do question how much of that data is ever going to be accessed in the future.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#185

Post by pimeys »

ttmb wrote: post #125

There really isn't a story here, Kev. You blew a power supply on your Synology. You even said it yourself: "maybe this is a problem with the enclosures and the disks are fine". If you'd put your disks into a replacement Synology unit, you would have been back online - config, data, and all - within a few minutes.

This is the reason I upgraded our Synology with a self-built NAS with six disks, a low-power Atom CPU and a really really good PSU connected to a UPS unit for extra security. Never save money with your NAS power solution.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#186

Post by cyphar »

AgentME wrote: post #145
cyphar wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

restic was mentioned a few times and is a very similar project with very similar goals. They both have encryption as a first-class concept and are snapshot based with content-defined chunking. I'd hope most people would be using these newer generations of backup tools.

My favorite benefit of restic is that it doesn't require the receiving end to have any special software: you can use restic to backup to S3 or BackBlaze B2 directly.

Yup, though due to Australian internet I don't use restic's support for non-local backends (otherwise getting a snapshot list or doing a purge+clean is painfully slow) -- I have a sync job that runs every day that uses rclone to sync the restic backup store.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#187

Post by blattimwind »

rsync wrote: post #135

Hard to believe we are 129 comments into this and there are zero mentions of 'borg' in the comment threads ... For those that don't know, borg is a backup utility[1] that has been called the "holy grail of backups"[2]. It takes your plaintext files and directories, chops them into gpg-encrypted chunks with encrypted, random filenames, and will upload (and maintain) them, with an efficient, changes-only update, to any…

The crypto in Borg is bad. Even has its own page in the docs about how bad it really is. The tl;dr is "there is one AES key per repository and we use this with AES-CTR and trust the remote server to not fiddle with the counter".

https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/internals/securi...

Last time I checked there was still no work being done on improving performance. Multithreading has been on the agenda for years and will probably never come, much like improved crypto.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#188

Post by blattimwind »

sooheon wrote: post #176
rsync wrote: post #135

Hard to believe we are 129 comments into this and there are zero mentions of 'borg' in the comment threads ... For those that don't know, borg is a backup utility[1] that has been called the "holy grail of backups"[2]. It takes your plaintext files and directories, chops them into gpg-encrypted chunks with encrypted, random filenames, and will upload (and maintain) them, with an efficient, changes-only update, to any…

Apparently the one downside of Borg is that it has to walk the whole filesystem for backups, rather than picking up changes: https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/issues/325 According to a more up to date comparison[1] (recommends Arq), Borg is also slow because it processes sequentially. [1]: https://www.lullabot.com/articles/backup-strategies-for-2018

> Apparently the one downside of Borg is that it has to walk the whole filesystem for backups, rather than picking up changes: https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/issues/325

This is true of most backup programs.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#189

Post by chmod775 »

rsync wrote: post #135

Hard to believe we are 129 comments into this and there are zero mentions of 'borg' in the comment threads ... For those that don't know, borg is a backup utility[1] that has been called the "holy grail of backups"[2]. It takes your plaintext files and directories, chops them into gpg-encrypted chunks with encrypted, random filenames, and will upload (and maintain) them, with an efficient, changes-only update, to any…

If you're using borg backup and would like to support the project, you can do so here: https://www.bountysource.com/teams/borgbackup

Took me forever to find that myself so just posting it here in the hopes that more people will support the developers.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#190

Post by albertzeyer »

I recently was also thinking about how to organize my data & backups. I still have not really decided. Esp about the software. I collected lots of options here: https://github.com/albertz/wiki/blob/master/backup-software....

At the moment, I really like Perkeep (https://perkeep.org/). But I'm not sure whether this is a solution for everything.

On the hardware side, I also have not really decided. I want to build up my own NAS (custom hardware, no preconfigured thing), which should be quiet (if it is not doing anything, i.e. most of the time), as it will be in my home. Another NAS maybe at my parents home. And then maybe some cloud storage.

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