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How I store my files

unixsheikh.com

21–30 of 144 posts

Re: How I store my files

#21

My approach is 6 years old and I use Time Capsule. The best ever solution for me. You set it up and you don't case anymore. It's Apple specific unfortunately. Don't know if there is a similar solution for Windows.

Just fyi those seem to be experiencing a data loss issue: https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/07/08/design-failure-in...

Re: How I store my files

#22

I also have a ZFS NAS and a separate backup server for the NAS that only gets turned on once a week. I disagree about his recommendation to avoid encryption. I keep the NAS and backup server drives encrypted. It’s not a big deal to unlock the drives at boot with a password and I’ve never had any issues with it. If someone breaks in and steals one of the servers, at least they won’t have access to years of all of my d…

> most people would get burned out by the complexity unless you really like managing servers, automating things with scripts, and navigating the little quirks that pop up with the hardware and software involved.

I didn't see the author's stated OS they use for their NAS, but depending on what it is, yes. {Free, True}NAS are dead easy to use as long as you stay inside the confines of the GUI, and hugely reliable. Anything else is no man's land. Running ZoL and you did a routine kernel update? Enjoy your new read-only ZFS pool!

I have a setup very similar to the author's, with a bunch of Debian VMs on top of Proxmox. Can confirm that even with Packer and Ansible handling base images and configuration, weird edge cases pop up that take quite a while to track down.

Re: How I store my files

#23
Does anybody use tape?

I currently have a Synology RAID6 and I use a cloud backup service. But I’ve been thinking about adding another layer in the form of off-site tapes. Any recommendations welcome.

Re: How I store my files

#24
post #7

I currently trust Restic with basically all of my long-term backups, which, according to the author, really isn't a thing I should do. However, I'm still somewhat confident in my strategy as I backup my all of my data to two entirely different repositories, one of them backed by Google Cloud, and another by the server sitting in my pantry. So one of these repositories could get irrecoverably corrupted and I still wou…

I have used restic for quite a while. Once in a while, I test that I can restore my backups. That's an important step that lots of people miss.

I had a client that asked me to setup their system. I setup the system, they got a tape drive and I had them rotate tapes daily. There was a cronjob to tar everything to tapes.

It was great until their hard drive failed and I found I had a typo where it was only backing up the current folder, not the whole drive. Needless to say, they found a new IT provider and I learned an important lesson. If you haven't tested your backups, you have no backups.

Re: How I store my files

#25
post #13

Something tricky is how to bootstrap restoration of backup. If you have lost "everything", how do you get it back? For example, if you use borg to backup remotely via ssh, you will need ssh keys as well as a passphrase for the encrypted backup. Where do you store those to make sure you have them if your computer is gone? What I did was create a self-extracting restoration script, which embedded everything needed. Thi…

For small stuff like this, print it out and put it in a safe deposit box.

Re: How I store my files

#26
I've been using btrfs and btrbk for a few months now and really enjoy it. I love that snapshots are easy to make, and btrbk is a fairly simple way to schedule taking snapshots and transferring them to another machine, as well as set up a retention strategy. I agree with the author that simpler is better -- if I lose data/delete a file I want back, it's as simple as mounting the snapshot and grabbing what I need.

Re: How I store my files

#27
post #3

I put everything in a Resilio Sync folder, and keep a full sync on at least two devices (a home NAS and a cloud seedbox). Resilio Sync handles pretty much everything. You instantly get hot backup, have files immediately available on every device you have, and if you have a phone you can download any file on demand, etc. Unlike other file synchronization methods such as `rsync --delete`, it keeps a version for every f…

I use resilio sync together with a NAS (which is still large enough to hold all my files, I wonder how long that'll stay given how much 6k BRAW footage I'm shooting), and I also sync to a Google Cloud Storage bucket from my NAS (moving items to Archive storage class if they haven't been touched in a while, significantly saving cost).

Re: How I store my files

#28

I also have a ZFS NAS and a separate backup server for the NAS that only gets turned on once a week. I disagree about his recommendation to avoid encryption. I keep the NAS and backup server drives encrypted. It’s not a big deal to unlock the drives at boot with a password and I’ve never had any issues with it. If someone breaks in and steals one of the servers, at least they won’t have access to years of all of my d…

> most people would get burned out by the complexity unless you really like managing servers, automating things with scripts, and navigating the little quirks that pop up with the hardware and software involved. I didn't see the author's stated OS they use for their NAS, but depending on what it is, yes. {Free, True}NAS are dead easy to use as long as you stay inside the confines of the GUI, and hugely reliable. Anyt…

I thought the same about Free/True NAS until I lost a ton of stuff. Be careful with these. Also, for big backups the performance has been terrible. I carefully followed their guide and the write speed is just dismal.

Re: How I store my files

#29
post #12

Can someone point me to the flaws of my method? I simply use Google Drive. Me and my partner have multiple devices (tablet, iPhone, Android phone, multiple Mac and Windows laptops) and we just sync folders to our desktop. We just store everything we don't want to lose in Drive. We share folders we both need. Photo's we take on our phones are automagically backed up in the cloud, music and movies are streamed. My hous…

I do the same with Dropbox. I've been doing this for years and it's saved me a number of times. I don't know if there are flaws with this but it's worked better than anything I've cobbled together myself.

Re: How I store my files

#30

>Not only does encryption during data recovery make everything much more difficult, but should you pass away, your family members might not have the skills required to access the data Uh, trust me, that's a good thing.

For your browser history, sure. But I for one make sure I rsync stuff to a Raspberry Pi4 with an external disk, at my parents place every now and then. In the event of my demise they can unplug it and have all our family pictures and videos. I'm really afraid that I make things to complicated for the people that I leave behind.
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