Backups Aren't Simple • Hacker News Board

Re: Backups Aren't Simple

#211

Post by Dylan16807 » Thu, Sep 17, 2026, 6:32 PM UTC

mrheosuper wrote: post #176

Dylan16807 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing audio over bluetooth also wakes things periodically, but it uses almost no power. With a similarly competent design photo transfer should be very battery efficient.

No, most(if not all) bluetooth controller has audio offload, basically the cpu does not involve(or very little) when transfering data from storage to radio.

Don't you mean yes bluetooth controllers have audio offload? "similarly competent design" means you do the exact same thing in the other direction. Instead of rarely waking up the CPU to coordinate sending, you rarely wake it up to coordinate receiving.

Re: Backups Aren't Simple

#212

Post by graemep » Thu, Sep 17, 2026, 7:36 PM UTC

bnegreve wrote: post #207

graemep wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if that happens after your monthly creation of a new backup.

I keep the previous backup for one month and then delete it. So eventually the file is lost yes, but this is inevitable if you assume finite amount of storage.

In that case I think its a good system. Its very similar to an incremental backup in what it achieves.

Re: Backups Aren't Simple

#213

Post by pmw » Thu, Sep 17, 2026, 7:43 PM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #39

snizovtsev wrote: post #30

I'm polishing my backup system right now, and found that `tar | zstd | gpg` plus a small vibe-coded wrapper is pretty much all I need. GNU tar has its own incremental index via `--listed-incremental=FILE`. Unlike Borg or Restic, which have their own more complicated repository formats, this leaves me with just one additional file (the `.snar`) alongside a dumb, portable full-disk tar archive. The nice part is that, u…

The problem with using glacier for backups is it's hard to run restore exercises, and without restore exercises, a backup is pretty dangerous

The most polished Glacier backup/restore mechanism I know -- because I helped build it -- is through rustic https://rustic.cli.rs/docs/commands/init/cold_storage.html>. It has native support for backing up to Glacier (because writing to Glacier is identical to writing to regular S3), and it supports external "warmup" programs to support cold storage of your choice, with Glacier having an existing warmup program you can use.