41–50 of 144 posts
>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.
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.
Have't needed to use them yet, but testing it was great.
>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.
Eg Camlistore/Perkeep had the premise of using JSON to store data. However some random person isn't going to write code to parse all that data, pull files out, etc. A lifeboat .exe might be interesting.
Though doing it in the most simple, least configurable, least breakable way seems.. necessary. Yea some baked in UI would be cool, but more moving parts means less likely to work.
Thumb drives. Financial stuff, copies of legal documents, large libraries of PDF books, reports, etc., etc. And then back the main drive up to FOUR thumb drive backups. Reasons: (1) USB drives are huge now. (2) Convenient - can move from one PC to another easily. (3) Convenient - I do NOT have time to mess with other solutions. (4) Safety - valuable financial stuff almost always OFFLINE reducing hacker vulnerability.…
>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.
Thumb drives. Financial stuff, copies of legal documents, large libraries of PDF books, reports, etc., etc. And then back the main drive up to FOUR thumb drive backups. Reasons: (1) USB drives are huge now. (2) Convenient - can move from one PC to another easily. (3) Convenient - I do NOT have time to mess with other solutions. (4) Safety - valuable financial stuff almost always OFFLINE reducing hacker vulnerability.…
Doesn’t thumbdrive data decay over time? Like all flash based storage types do
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…
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.
The hardware itself is relatively simple but (at least in my experience - I tried quite a few options but they were all missing at least one key feature) there's no good "set and forget" software solution out there in the same way as there is for online backups so you're going to spend a long time scripting it all and tweaking it properly. You can build a solution on top of whichever other tools fit your needs that way. I have a set of scripts which create my backups in single large files on disk ready to be spooled out, then I use mbuffer to actually put the data onto tape.
In terms of hardware, 1 or 2 generation old LTO drives are often available for a decent price in good condition on eBay. You'll also need either an SAS or Fibre Channel interface depending on what drive you buy. As far as I can tell they're pretty much all supported by Linux these days.
Given the complexity of scripting and potential for user errors, testing that you can restore properly is pretty well essential, of course.
This is very good advice.
That being said, humans need heuristics and shortcuts to aid in decision-making. I hope the fact that rsync.net has been doing this work since 2001 is helpful in that regard.
...
"There exist some really cool open source backup solutions such as Borg, Restic and duplicity, but you should never rely solely on these "complex" solutions. These tools work really great, until they don't! In the past I have lost data to duplicity and other tools."
I think this is very good advice as well - and that is coming from someone who has whole-heartedly endorsed 'borg' as a backup tool and regularly recommends it. It is the "holy grail of backups"[1] after all ...
It's also a magic black box for most users and would be difficult to work out failures.
The safest and (in my opinion) most useful workflow is to back up your data locally to some kind of NAS or fileserver using plain old rsync and then back up that fileserver to rsync.net (or whomever) using the fancy borg tool.
Now you have quick and simple local restores but still have a backup in the cloud that requires zero trust in the provider.