I Nearly Lost All of My Data • Hacker News Board

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#201

Post by FabHK » Sun, Jan 20, 2019, 1:59 PM UTC

Silly mistake I nearly made:

MacBook Pro in for repair incl. wiped disk. No problem, I have two external drives with regular TimeMachine backups, so go ahead.

Having received the laptop back, I plug in one of the disk drives and - oops, it's encrypted (with a good, safe, long password of random characters), which had previously been stored in the local login keychain, so that the disk drives have always just silently automatically mounted over the years, and I totally forgot that they were encrypted!

Fortunately, I had the password saved somewhere and access to it. Otherwise my backups would have been for nought (though of course they themselves had the disk password inside... well protected by itself.)

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#202

Post by michaelt » Sun, Jan 20, 2019, 1:59 PM UTC

fencepost wrote: post #130

Things that jumped out at me from this: First, the USB external is probably OK except that its USB circuitry has taken a power hit. If it's a standard SATA drive inside that could probably be shucked and accessed. Counter: Some of these have drives that are no longer SATA but have a bunch of the USB connectivity built into the drive. At that point, you'd probably be looking at a few hundred $ of data recovery costs (…

  First, the USB external is probably OK except
  that its USB circuitry has taken a power hit.

Maybe. But where do you think a USB external hard drive gets the 5v that is the sole power input to most SATA SSDs?

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#203

Post by FabHK » Sun, Jan 20, 2019, 2:07 PM UTC

steelframe wrote: post #83

As the saying goes, nobody wants a backup. What they want is a restore.

Very good point. As I pointed out in another comment in this thread, I had my backup disks encrypted with a password safely stored on the disk that was being backed up. Backups were just fine, but the restore depended on that password. Fortunately I had access to it via another means, otherwise: no restore. Sobering.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#204

Post by lscotte » Sun, Jan 20, 2019, 2:10 PM UTC

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…

Not only is borg great, rsync.net has a super cheap plan for borg and attic that is vastly less expensive than other cloud storage. I have about 140GB backed up this way and couldn't be more happy with the toolchain.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#205

Post by codingdave » Sun, Jan 20, 2019, 2:24 PM UTC

No matter what your backup tech is, if you have it all in a single location, you don't truly have a reliable backup.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#206

Post by AdamGibbins » Sun, Jan 20, 2019, 2:28 PM UTC

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…

Love borg, can't rate it enough. There's also a pretty great service that supports it, you might have heard of it? ;) https://rsync.net/products/attic.html

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#207

Post by dataflow » Sun, Jan 20, 2019, 2:37 PM UTC

m3nu wrote: post #199

blattimwind wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 year…

Like many open source projects, Borg is low on developers. The two points you mention are both known and on the agenda for this year. Since you seem to have experience with crypto, why not add a PR? It's all in Python and fairly readable.

>> Multithreading has been on the agenda for years and will probably never come, much like improved crypto.

> The two points you mention are both known and on the agenda for this year

This is a rather strange response to the above...

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#208

Post by niij » Sun, Jan 20, 2019, 2:51 PM UTC

timthorn wrote: post #34

x220 wrote: post #6

>I don’t know what happened for sure, but I think it may have been a power surge that fried the boards on both the Synology and the USB, as they were plugged in to the same socket. He didn't have a surge protector? Sweet Jesus. I don't plug my backed-up PC into anything not surge protected.

Surge protection isn't a big thing in the UK these days. You can get arresters but it's really rare now to hear of computer damage as a result of mains spikes.

You don't have lightning in the UK?

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#209

Post by gpm » Sun, Jan 20, 2019, 3:43 PM UTC

m3nu wrote: post #199

blattimwind wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 year…

Like many open source projects, Borg is low on developers. The two points you mention are both known and on the agenda for this year. Since you seem to have experience with crypto, why not add a PR? It's all in Python and fairly readable.

When someone says something is the "holy grail of backups" and it is "gpg-encrypted" I assume it does that well, not it does it poorly right now but might improve in the near future.

Thus his post was valuable to me.

"Why not add a PR" is not a reasonable response to something like this. I'm looking to use a backup system, not create one. If something works so poorly that I'd have to start submitting PRs before using it, I'm far more inclined to go elsewhere.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#210

Post by baseballMan » Sun, Jan 20, 2019, 3:46 PM UTC

Is it weird that I don't have GBs of my own personal files/data? I get if you have movies/tv shows or whatever, that's different. I just don't know what personal data you could possibly have that would amount to GBs...