71–80 of 701 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cloud backups are just one layer of a robust backup strategy. A copy on your desk, one in your closet, one at your parents, one in Backblaze, one in Glacier, etc. “It’s not a backup until you restore it.”
Personally, I'm relying on the NSA having backed up all my data.
There are two kinds of users: those who back up their data, and those who haven't experienced a data loss yet. This is your daily reminder that anything that's connected is not a backup . Yes, that includes the hard drive in your machine. For that matter, RAID is not a backup solution. Yes, that includes cloud sync (Dropbox/OneDrive/GDrive/etc) that propagates changes automatically. That's not backup. And that includ…
I think this backup maximalism can be taken further. Say if it’s not one of many tapes stored offsite at an Iron Mountain repository, it’s not a backup. Or multiple locations at that, can’t discount redundancy (what if one location gets nuked)
To find out if something is a backup or not, ask a simple question: does the availability of the data on it correlate with what's happening to the system it's backing up?
If the answer is no, then it's not a backup.
Whether your tape storage gets nuked or not does not, in any way, correlate with whether your system gets hacked into, or whether someone who has a grudge against you messes with your system.
Then P(data loss) = P(system is fucked) x P(backup is fucked).
If your backup is not decoupled from the system, then P(data loss) = P(system is fucked) -- which is a far larger.
You don't need to take your tapes to Everest. You just need to decouple them from the source.
TL;DR: if you can destroy a backup from the system it's backing up, it's not a backup :)
> “It is very scary and devastating that someone can do factory restore on my drive without any permission granted from the end user,” one user wrote. I'll say again: backup drives must have a physical write enable switch on them. To all the people who argue against this - just you wait till it happens to you! Not having multiple backups is also a very bad idea. One day my 8T drive slipped out of my hand and smacked…
you do need some sort of off-site backup for disaster recovery. House can burn down, get burglarized, flooded, and you absolutely must account for that if you really want to mitigate the risk
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It's more nuanced than that. Many of those things you mention are backups, just not necessarily that reliable for certain threats. By your standards, you'd probably say tapes, removed from their drive, are a backup. Yet, buildings burn down, taking the tapes with them. If restoring backups from off-line, off-site storage is going to take days or weeks, then for some organisations, you may as well not have a backup. C…
I agree with what you say, I'm just nitpicking on differentiating redundancy from backups . Yes, a building with tapes can burn down. But whether it does so or not is not correlated with the state of the system that the original data lives on. Redundancy is a great step to prevent data loss. But redundancy won't do what a backup would: keep your data safe even if your system is fucked . Cloud sync is a double-edged s…
Everything else is secondary and can be covered by both. The chance of your redundant data center burning down at the same time as your primary is also low. If one burns down, you just bring up another. Likewise for smaller-scale users, where the chance of your cloud provider being down when your house burns down is also incredibly low.
So it's really the versioning or snapshot nature that's the key aspect of backups as opposed to simple redundancy.
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> Cloud backup is a stupid idea. At any moment it could go dark, for any reason, and you have no recourse. Might as well bare your throat and hand some random stranger a razor. I really disagree - physical storage in your home is the common alternative for a lot of consumer users - and that physical storage will involve maybe unplugging your external hard drive between backups - but otherwise never checking for the c…
do you know of any tools for consistency/accuracy? I've been meaning to do some basic md5 checks for all my files but haven't gotten around to it. Every now and then I find a corrupt jpg image that has a rectangular band running through it or something of the like.
EDIT: According to Wikipedia, ZFS, Btrfs and ReFS offer strategies to deal with various forms of data degradation, although it appears as if ZFS is still king.
It may sound a little unfair, but the MyBook has been on my personal Ban List for 14 years now. (has it been that long ?) I don't know if they still do this, but there was a time their NAS would refuse to allow access to MP3 files over a network. To fight piracy. https://www.theregister.com/2007/12/07/western_digital_drm_c... (Was www.wired.com/2007/12/western-digital)
But I have no idea if they would've even had to pay that in the first place on these devices.
Almost bought one of these, but opted for a raspi and usb3 external drive instead. Works great with Time Machine. https://saschaeggi.medium.com/use-a-raspberry-pi-4-for-time-... was my guide, though I deviated by using ext4 instead of hfs, and didn't need avahi.
I'm inclined to write off (anyone using a WD "My Book" device) as beyond help but a simple SFTP client like WinSCP or Cyberduck or Filezilla is comprehensible to just about everyone . You drag and drop to the SFTP destination[1] which covers "History"[2] with immutable ZFS snapshots and "Integrity"[3] with ZFS itself and "Security"[4] by running nothing but OpenSSH. If you're going to set your parents up with somethi…
Are you forgetting the recent post about how kids these days don't even have any concept of files? You're over-estimating most people in their technical competence and the required level of understanding and patience needed to do anything with SFTP. You say "drag and drop" and I think of the hours of troubleshooting and explaining (and re-explaining) I'd have to do if I were to try to implement this with family.
> “It is very scary and devastating that someone can do factory restore on my drive without any permission granted from the end user,” one user wrote. I'll say again: backup drives must have a physical write enable switch on them. To all the people who argue against this - just you wait till it happens to you! Not having multiple backups is also a very bad idea. One day my 8T drive slipped out of my hand and smacked…
> Cloud backup is a stupid idea WHAT!? How the heck did you get that conclusion from this story? These are literally your people, who backed up to a local device and essentially chose their own local NAS rather then the cloud. Which unfortunately for them came from a company with bad support that dropped it 6 years ago and likely did a shitty job even before that. But not everyone can be a tech person! Even tech peop…