161–170 of 213 posts
> “There are two types of people: those who have suffered a catastrophic loss of data, and those who will.” When I was a teenager, I was the reason for data loss for my dad, twice. Both times it was because I was re-partitioning a hard drive to install linux. You would think that taught me a lesson about backups, instead it reminds me every now and again to be grateful for an awesome dad and aspire to handle situatio…
> There are two types of people: those who have suffered a catastrophic loss of data, and those who will. This is an empirical claim, but is it grounded in reality? 99% of people don't backup, and that's probably the right choice because the risk is low, they can't meaningfully improve their restoration rate themselves and they don't care enough about their data to classify its loss as catastrophic. When a person hea…
Let's say SSDs have an annualized failure rate of 1%. (The real figures are from 0.5% for more reliable ones, 1.5% for less reliable ones). The annualized failure rate for HDDs is a bit higher, but let's give it 1% anyway. Over 40 years (even with changing disks, upgrading PCs, etc.), the chances of you ending up with your data intact is 0.99^40=0.67. May not seem too bad, but this is just a hardware failure of your…
For my small library photos, keepass passwords, etc around 30gb, I use syncthing, which will backup on my pc, on my parents pc (they live in another country), on my sisters pc and on my phone. They also use this triangular mode to backup their stuff. Syncthing is setup to only sync through tailscale or home routers network.
sync is not backup Also why you sync through LAN only?
> tailscale or home routers network
Bit rot was mentioned in the article, but then no solution was offered. I also haven't found a good solution, unfortunately. If you only have a couple of Terabytes you could create check sums of everything and then verify regularly, but I feel this approach doesn't scale very well if you have lots of data.
If you have lots of data, I would suggest using a filesystem designed for this, like ZFS or BTRFS. You would still have to spend in storage though, as ultimately protecting from bit rot requires redundancy.
However, looking at prices, I can see one of those backups just being dismantled to be used as more storage.
A bit of a tangent, but the linked rsnapshot tool is about 7k lines of perl code. The COPYING file is 20 years old and it's still maintained, the last change was 6 months ago. I'm feeling really old. [1]: https://github.com/rsnapshot/rsnapshot/blob/master/rsnapshot...
I really like ZFS snapshots with offsite pull-mode sync using Jim Salter's sanoid/syncoid [1]. ZFS is the base for all OS/filesystems on top of it. If you have a good system for organizing ZFS datasets, and separating ephemeral from persistent data (e.g. [2]), then this is 90% of the backup requirements already fullfilled. [1]: https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid [2]: https://du.nkel.dev/blog/2026-05-16_rootless_d…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's plenty of backup services and cloud solutions. The article mentions Borg and Restic, others like Backblaze are more consumer friendly. Which needs do you have that aren't met by any of these tools?
> backup services and cloud solutions online backup should not be your primary method of backup, you're one billing, identity theft, financial issue, or health issue away from getting your backup nuked do you have PBS clout? if not good luck https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/08/pbs-s...
It was such a tremendously silly decision I almost wonder if it wasn't a politically motivated decision. Maybe the provider that went under had some relative DEI points versus Backblaze or AWS. Just bizarre.
But I wouldn't extrapolate anything out from their situation.
> “There are two types of people: those who have suffered a catastrophic loss of data, and those who will.” When I was a teenager, I was the reason for data loss for my dad, twice. Both times it was because I was re-partitioning a hard drive to install linux. You would think that taught me a lesson about backups, instead it reminds me every now and again to be grateful for an awesome dad and aspire to handle situatio…
I wrote about this here [1].
[1] https://staticnotes.org/posts/cloud-backups-with-restic/