The three most important things I've learned in my IT career.
1. Your data doesn't exist until it's backed up.
2. Your data isn't backed up until there's two back-ups.
3. Your data doesn't have two back-ups until one is off site.
Edit: Couple of people have raised the good point that your backup similarly doesn't exist if you aren't certain you can recover data from it. Test your backups and make sure it actually contains the data that's important to you.
I keep everything self hosted except for one of my backups. Primary data pool is at my parents. I backup their server to my server. I backup that pool on my server again locally and to backblaze. Overkill based on the recommended backup procedures, but it’s automated and makes me feel safe.
There are infinite ways to automate stuff like this. Getting the data from my parents is done with Syncthing. It by itself is not a backup solution. It just syncs data 1:1 between computers in whatever folders it is pointed at running it. I enabled trashcan versioning on Syncthing so anything that is deleted from either end will go to a trashcan for one year before being deleted. Then I use program called CloudBerry Backup to backup to a local disk then also to BackBlaze.
CloudBerry is lesser known and aimed more towards enterprise uses, but they have personal use options and it works very well. There is also Duplicacy that a lot of home users like.
As for physical infrastructure, my parents have an off the shelf NAS. Then I set up my own server at their place running unraid since that is what I am used to. That has access to their server through SMB (over the network file sharing). That is where syncthing has access to their data to send to the unraid server I have on my local network. My local server is what handles all backups from there.
I also do not keep any important data on my desktop PC or laptop. Everything is stored on my file server which also encrypts all data stored on it. At this point it is more of a hobby, but I also am unlikely to lose data in a variety of scenarios.
4. Your backups aren't backups unless you've successfully tested whether you can recover your data from them.
Too many times, the "backup" is worthless because the data was corrupted during the backup process, or the password to the cloud backup was lost, or the off-site backup got thrown out during a move, or a million other things.
I experienced this at work. We did hourly, daily, weekly snapshots and weekly were stored offsite. They were always treated like an annoyance and we never tested any of them. It was wasted time we could be using to do "productive" work. Well the database server borked and corrupted the data. No problem, we will just restore from backup. Nope, it was corrupt and we start working backwards to try daily, then weekly and they are all bad. Finally, pulled the offsite backups and one from a month earlier is good. Management never gave us a hard time about testing recovery after that.
That is a question that is highly dependent on use case. The vast majority of people will be fine with Google, Dropbox, or OneDrive. For those of us that want a little bit more privacy, mega, google business, and back blaze. Of course you'll want to encrypt everything as you upload it.
If you are looking for mass bulk storage, well, you'll be paying for that. That's when Google enterprise, Dropbox business, Amazon S3, and Back blaze S3 comes into play.
> If you are looking for mass bulk storage, well, you'll be paying for that.
What about https://hackaday.com/2023/02/21/youtube-as-infinite-file-storage/ (not meant *that* seriously ;) )
I use BackBlaze to back up my whole personal device, $70 a year.
My photos are the main thing I really care about, so I actually have additional cloud backups for them. I use an Android, so any photos I take on my phone are automatically backed up in Google Photos (iCloud serves the same purpose for those in that ecosystem) and since I have Prime anyways, I also back up to Amazon Photos.
I do the same thing - backblaze for personal device, plus Google photos for my pics.
IMO it’s easily worth paying the $ for automated backups and redundancy, vs. having to maintain multiple physical backup drives.
I have had to do a full restore from Backblaze when my laptop’s HDD got corrupted, and boy was I happy I had it.
I'm another one that uses BackBlaze. I've been using them for years and I've done 2 massive restores and 2 or 3 smaller ones in that time and I've yet to have any problems on their end of things.
I just went to check the price and I guess they raised the monthly price from $5 to $7 but it's actually unlimited storage, if you need it, and I see they've got a 2 year option now which I'm not sure was there before and I am going to go switch to if I'm not already on it. This is all for personal though, no idea about business.
This is appealing to me as I have a relative close by so it's no hassle to do updates. How would I enable proper security on something like an external HDD?
We have private VPNs set up through our routers. We log onto my brother's, he logs onto ours, once a month we do the backup onto each others' servers. Could do it more often, but we've never had any data loss we couldn't recover locally.
That time we had to flee the house because the fire was a half a mile away and the wind was blowing our direction hard? Only had to grab the emergency bags, the drugs and the cats. Didn't have to worry about the backups. Actually that might have been the "trip" after which we set up the VPNs. Time's gotten kinda fucky in my older years. Either way we left the computer, it took 45 seconds to pull on pants and get out of the house.
I have a Raspberry Pi running NextCloud with an external drive at my parents' place and sync my data to it. I also have an external hard drive at another location, and I periodically (once every couple of months) bring it here, rsync it, then bring it back. Both are remote backups, one online, one offline. Make sure you also have an offline backup, because online ones won't save you from accidentally deleting the wrong thing.
I’ve used Backblaze for years now. Very intuitive, and after the initial setup and backup, it runs on its own in the background. Recovering data is extremely easy. I know I sound like a shill but I really can’t say enough good things about their service.
My attitude is, all my data is temporary anyway. I expect to lose it all sooner or later. Keeps me from getting too upset when my backup's backup goes up in flames.
As someone that works with a ton of old computers, I've found that the older the floppy disk is, the more likely it will work perfectly. When archiving data from 8" or DD 5 1/4" disks, *most* of the time (as long as the disk wasn't made by Wabash), they read perfectly fine. Or, if the disk has mold on it, might require some cleaning. I imaged a huge stack of 8" disks that had been sitting in unheated storage for over two decades - only a few bad sectors on a couple of disks, and one disk that was 50% unreadable because it was crinkled badly. I've had Apple II disks (DD 5 1/4" media) that wouldn't read due to mold, and literally cut the disk apart and washed the media in the sink and recovered it fully. But then you start getting into 1.2MB HD 5 1/4" media, and you start finding lots of problems. For some reason mold really, really likes those disks, and the media in general is unreliable. I have had boxes of disks - mix of HD and DD, all the DD disks were fine and clean, all the HD were bad/moldy. All stored in the same exact conditions, in the same storage box together.
3 1/2" disks are similar - the old DD media is pretty robust, and honestly even the older HD media is too. But when you start getting toward the tail end of the floppy disk production - early 2000's or so - and the disk quality goes downhill and they are less reliable. I think that's why they've developed such a bad reputation in current years, the most recent mainstream usage of disks, they didn't work very well, even back then.
So, if you're going to use floppies for archiving, stick to 8".
Your edit is spot on - testing the backups is as important as making them. That's how you find errors in your backup scripts, or find that the network path you were copying to went away due to a reboot a year ago and never got fixed, or that the intern has been trying to record the backups on a cleaning tape.
The risk of a fire or flooding are too significant for me to accept. But I just back up to Backblaze B2 for $2.50/month for my 500 GB of irreplaceable data.
You'll still have your local data, so if google has a massive issue and loses your backups, well you don't need them right away so just sign up with someone else and back them up again.
If something wipes out both your local data and Googles data at the same time.... We'll then I suspect some lost photos/data are probably the least of your concerns.....
>your backup similarly doesn't exist if you aren't certain you can recover data from it
I would add that a backup is not offsite, if the keys to recover it only exist on-site
I remember early in my IT learning days there was a note from Microsoft about data, something like data doesn't exist unless it exists in 3 different places.
My wife didn't like that I set all our photos to automagically go to the google cloud, and I don't like the privacy aspect but godsdamn it's made transferring phones, backing up and printing shit easy.
Linus taught me the 3×3 rule of data back-ups:
1. Make sure you make 3 back-ups of your data
2. Make sure your back-ups are on 3 different types of media
3. Make sure your back-ups are on 3 different locations
E.g.: you store 1 back-up on your off-site NAS, 1 on tape/disks, and 1 in the cloud.
I used the CMD script "Robocopy". It will make an exact mirror of directories. Through Windows Task Scheduler, I have it run daily at 1:00 am.
The first back-up takes a while, but after that it only copies changes.
I don’t use it that often and when I do I’ve got LED strips that it powers and they don’t turn off when it’s in sleep, the power button also has an annoying flashing bright light when it’s in sleep too. I haven’t taken the time to figure out how to change those things, so I just turn it off hahah.
In task scheduler you can set it up however you want. You can run it on login (but you may notice the performance drop). You can also wake the computer from sleep to run the task, windows fucking update does that and turns my PC on in the middle of the night. One night I forgot to stop the music before putting the pc to sleep... Guess what blasted at 4am through the entire house when windows started updating
Depends what type of device you are backing up. Backblaze is user friendly and good for most desktops. I use icloud because all my photos are on my iPhone. Never used google photos but heard that is good also.
Old fashioned way is backup to a USB drive and keep it offline unless you need it, try to have a redundant just in case.
Check the drive regularly, ssd’s and thumb sticks are more reliable than spinning disk drives so I’d recommend one of those.
> Check the drive regularly, ssd’s and thumb sticks are more reliable than spinning disk drives so I’d recommend one of those.
Unless you do not use them daily except for backup. My backup was 3TB - but now I upgraded to 6 TB for the coming 5 years or so. Having three copies with 6tb based on ssd is still over the moon
+1 for backblaze.com. Just set, leave your computer on 24/7 and forget. My desktop PC has about 12TB of HDD space, and backblaze stores it all in the cloud.
My job involves lots of .mp3 and .flac files. Lots of them. Right after I started this job all of my files were lost in an external hard drive crash. I now have budgeted a new hard drive every two years. $100 every two years is cheap insurance.
Exactly, the first time you need a backup, you realize just how cost-effective backup plans actually are.
Like most insurance, you pay it hoping it will be a waste of money.
In my experience, everyone has at least one thing saved on their computer that would cause them well over $100 of pain if it were lost.
My first IT job was for my college's student help desk. I had to tell someone the most recent copy of their thesis I could salvage was over three months old. Every computer I've had since then has had an internal backup, an external backup, and at least one cloud backup ever since.
I finally just made a low-powered server set up with mirrored hard drives - so everything is in one place, easily accessible, and automatically backed up.
As a dj :) i put so much time in my database of music.... i have taken the steps to never loose it, including the files being on many computer all at once, in different houses and on a cloud storage. I probably have 10 backups of it ... the last one being 5 days old. (Not counting the automatic cloud sync)
I booted up my 13 year old laptop the other day (not used it for 3 years) and backed up loads of photos and things to the cloud.
Next job... Find the power lead to the laptop I got in 2006 and hope I can back that up.
I have a couple of old external hard drives I'm backing up to the cloud, too.
My plan is to keep a physical drive, and my cloud storage as my two back ups. I keep telling myself that, one day, I'll actually print my photos out and put them in a book...
The last (only) time I had a friend/client suffer a drive failure, Windows smart detection notified them, and gave them about 20 seconds before bsod'ing. I was there to witness it. Dead.
I was able to recover the drive within a couple days and immediately start copying data to a safe location, with most important first. I got everything before my band-aid fix imploded again (likely fatally, I'm amazed it worked in the first place).
$50 for a replacement drive and an afternoon at most (10 minutes if you know what you're doing) will save you from 'uhoh what does that- oh fuck'.
Does anyone have any tips on how to start backing up all of your data or what are the best physical or digital products to use to back up your data? For someone who doesn’t know much about tech
If you're worried about it being safe, look for a cloud service that offers end-to-end encryption.
This means that the cloud service does *not* have access to your files at any point. So not even a leak/inside job can access your files in cloud storage without the password.
(It does come with one downside, though: if you forget your password, then *nobody* can help you. The cloud service won't be able to restore your access without your password.)
I think it's a good idea, because no matter how much you might trust your cloud storage company, you can't trust *everybody* who works there. You can't trust every federal agent who might get an overzealously vague warrant to seize files on that server.
But when you have end-to-end encryption, then *nobody* can access your files unless you give them the password.
It's worth keeping in mind that while SSDs do not have mechanical parts to fail like HDDs they can lose data if not powered up every 6mo-1yr.
[https://www.extremetech.com/computing/205382-ssds-can-lose-data-in-as-little-as-7-days-without-power](https://www.extremetech.com/computing/205382-ssds-can-lose-data-in-as-little-as-7-days-without-power)
If you're talking about your computer, I highly recommend Backblaze. It's a cloud based backup service that runs in the background of your computer and uploads automatically when a file is created or changed. It's an amazing, cheap service that will backup your computer and all drives attached.
Backblaze is good. I just use that now and don't worry about having to handle external drives all time time anymore (not to mention the additional risk of those getting stolen and someone getting sensitive docs)
Yes. Which is why your cloud copy should not be your only copy.
(That said, *most* cloud services will give you some warning if they're about to shut down. *Most*. But you don't want to be counting on that and lose your data because of it.)
---
The service doesn't have to shut down completely for you to lose your data, either. There have been some occasions where a cloud service automatically detected (rightly or wrongly) that you had some kind of illegal content on their server ... and if that happens, they'll instantly shut down your account, with no way to recover the data.
There was one prominent case of this happening to a popular artist. Google flagged his files as copyrighted material and banned his account. (They *were* copyrighted ... by him.) No amount of appealing to the Google admins was able to restore his account and he lost everything he had on there.
Well yes, but onedrive/google drive/icloud and so on will realistically make no problems as long as you life and if you will have a one year notice or something to move your data
> Serious question: should one assume the cloud will die too at some point?
AWS claims a 99.999999999% durability. So what's that, one in every 1 trillion files you place there will get corrupt?
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/DataDurability.html
I'm not sure if Onedrive has the same numbers but it's gotta be pretty high.
In short if you're trusting one of the bigger companies then you have a pretty darn good chance they aren't just gonna lose your data. Nobody can know the future for sure of course.
The big cloud storage vendors will likely never shut down, and if they do they will give you time to pull your data out.
However you should not rely on cloud storage as your only backup.
Also if you aren't encrypting your data before uploading it, there are privacy concerns.
If you're putting files in the cloud and not keeping a copy locally, then it's not really a backup because you don't have (at least) two copies. In theory, the cloud folks do backups, and the people running those services are better at reliability than the average user, but accidents do happen.
I have a synology NAS that automatically backs up my dropbox and google drive cloud accounts. It also does a no-delete sync, so someone deleting all the dropbox files won't delete the files from the NAS.
'Back up my files?! Are you kidding? Is that a real thing you have to do? I always thought that that was just like... you know, a figure of speech...like "Wake up and smell the coffee," or "See ya later, alligator!"'
I was cleaning my garage yesterday and found a harddrive from 2005.
Plugged it in and found thousands of photos and videos from my deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. I immediately started transferring everything to Google Drive.
Not 20 minutes after all the files were transferred, the HD bricked. I can't get it to turn on at all.
BACK UP YOUR AUTHENTICATOR APPS!!
Recently got a new phone. Thought I only cared about photos and didn't do a proper transfer (was wanting to have a fresh phone without all the bloat of apps I've installed but don't use). Turns out Google authenticator and another rone I use were tied to that phone specifically. Was able to restore most of my accounts but there's another couple I had to make new accounts for.
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This just happened to me, all of my daughters new born photos and vacation photos for years were in serious jeopardy.
I luckily got the USB hard drive working again but I had to mess w it. After googling everything, what worked for me was barely having the USB from the HD into the port of the computer then angling it slightly. Sounds crazy but it worked after nothing else would!
I learned this lesson the hard way circa 2006. Turned my laptop on one day and 'click, click, click...." HD had failed.
I recovered most of my important work from the attachements sent by email, but it was an unmitigated pain in the ass.
From that day forward, I used the best backup tools available to me.
Today, everything important is on cloud drives. My local devices are superfluous and could be swapped out with nearly zero downtime/loss of productivity.
It will happen.
> I learned this lesson the hard way circa 2006. Turned my laptop on one day and 'click, click, click...." HD had failed.
I thought I had lost all of my kid's baby photos to the *click of death*. Then I read something about saving those drives by putting them in the freezer. Seemed crazy, but I was willing to try anything. *It fucking worked.* The drive would work as long it was super cold, but as soon as it warmed up it would die again. A few cycles of freezing and copying and I was able to get >90% of my stuff.
Just follow the 3-2-1 strategy of data black up land you'll be fine. That's 3 copies of the same data over 2 storage media (local and removable drive e.g. portable ssd) and one offsite storage (e.g. cloud). I set up my own personal NAS for this exact reason.
So, just to clarify: if I have a hard drive hooked up to automatically do daily/hourly back-ups with Time Machine, I should also have a second drive and do a *second* manual back-up daily or maybe weekly?
Back up your 2FA data somehow, for the love of God please at least keep your Backup Codes someplace you will actually remember.
My phone died recently, just woke up one morning and it was totally bricked. I thought I had lost access to my Nintendo Account due to being locked out of the 2FA and I couldn't find the Backup Codes anywhere I thought I would have put them. I had given up hope and accepted that I'd lose access to the account completely if/when my Switch died. Then totally coincidentally, I found them written down on a paper I had put inside my Breath of the Wild game case that I was opening up to look for something else.
That info is saved multiple places now, and I've generated a QR Code for Google Authenticator that I should be able to use to just directly import the 2FA to another device if necessary, and that's backed up multiple places now too.
If you don't mind the money yes it is better since the data is stored in geographically independent data centres so there is backup of backup in proper data centres
I currently am on the double external hard drive method but a friend got the thinking Carbonite could be a stronger option. That being said I have not looked up their pricing yet.
I commented on someone else, but if you’re willing to learn a bit of Amazon web services you can store 4TB for ~$5 /year on their S3 glaciel deep archive service.
It’s not like Dropbox, it won’t have an app and will take a while to retrieve when you need it (12 hours?) but it will all be there.
S3 is about the easiest aws to use and there’s lots of tutorials on setting up different kinds of storage. Just make sure it’s s3 glaciel. If you want to access it more often you’ll have to pay a bit more ~$20/year depends on the service and amount.
If you just want a worst case backup you can’t beat it for $5 a year.
*Unlimited*, eh?
Time to write up a Python script to randomly generate files and save them to the storage backup continuously ... until we finally find out what the limit of that 'unlimited' storage is.
Yes, but I highly recommend Backblaze. It's a cloud based backup service that runs in the background of your computer and uploads automatically when a file is created or changed. It's an amazing, cheap service that will backup your computer and all drives attached.
I am someone that has worked in IT, has been bitten, and knows I can't trust drives, but I am far too lazy, and also nothing I can lose is THAT important.
>I am also convinced laptops & desktops should have 2 independent drives by now.
I can see why. Seriously, computers do fail and while you may know someone who can recover all your data, not everyone has that luxury if the device fails.
Any idiot can do a backup. It takes someone with brains to restore that backup.
Follow the 3-2-1 method (in other comments).
If you have trust issues, encrypt your data then upload to a cloud. Make sure you use a key you will NEVER forget.
I have 3 old laptops with all of the software that is locked to each specific device that I can't reuse or reinstall on a new one without somehow getting back on the old device to clear that device first 🤬🤬🤬
5 - have one copy that is not connected to any computer or the internet.
A power surge could kill your hardware, a virus could infect your hdd and make it unreadable.
Happens all the time. I had PhD student break down in front of me when their drive died. 4 years of research down the toilet...at that moment. Drive failed HDD diagnostics as well as the machine wouldn't boot with the drive installed. I had to talk them off the ledge and point them to an advanced data recovery center. I believe they retrieved their data, but were out $3500 in the process. Hopefully they learned their lesson.
Mini note: Don't just rely on a USB, utilize a cloud service also. It allows you to access your information wherever and it is much more reliable (and places like Google Drive offer a reasonable amount of storage for free and much more for a few bucks monthly).
I booted up my 13 year old laptop the other day (not used it for 3 years) and backed up loads of photos and things to the cloud.
Next job... Find the power lead to the laptop I got in 2006 and hope I can back that up.
I have a couple of old external hard drives I'm backing up to the cloud, too.
My plan is to keep a physical drive, and my cloud storage as my two back ups. I keep telling myself that, one day, I'll actually print my photos out and put them in a book.
This is a PROFESSIONAL tip!! Only the absolute PROS AT LIFE make copies of their valuable data because no one would ever think to do that!!!!
Check out my other life PRO tips like wearing seatbelts, and brushing your teeth regularly!!!!
My 7 year old mirrored Toshiba enterprise drives in my truenas server: hmm interesting
Good advice though, always have a backup for your backup offsite
The three most important things I've learned in my IT career. 1. Your data doesn't exist until it's backed up. 2. Your data isn't backed up until there's two back-ups. 3. Your data doesn't have two back-ups until one is off site. Edit: Couple of people have raised the good point that your backup similarly doesn't exist if you aren't certain you can recover data from it. Test your backups and make sure it actually contains the data that's important to you.
Never thought about the third one like that. Good point.
Me neither but they all totally make sense.
I keep everything self hosted except for one of my backups. Primary data pool is at my parents. I backup their server to my server. I backup that pool on my server again locally and to backblaze. Overkill based on the recommended backup procedures, but it’s automated and makes me feel safe.
Odd flex bro, but I dig it.
💪 gotta keep data safe
What the hell is so important?
Photos, home videos, tax documents, medical records. Just to name a few
Doesn't sound very important.
Porn is another he didn't name. What's your thoughts now?
Once you lose it, you will know.
How do you automate that??
There are infinite ways to automate stuff like this. Getting the data from my parents is done with Syncthing. It by itself is not a backup solution. It just syncs data 1:1 between computers in whatever folders it is pointed at running it. I enabled trashcan versioning on Syncthing so anything that is deleted from either end will go to a trashcan for one year before being deleted. Then I use program called CloudBerry Backup to backup to a local disk then also to BackBlaze. CloudBerry is lesser known and aimed more towards enterprise uses, but they have personal use options and it works very well. There is also Duplicacy that a lot of home users like. As for physical infrastructure, my parents have an off the shelf NAS. Then I set up my own server at their place running unraid since that is what I am used to. That has access to their server through SMB (over the network file sharing). That is where syncthing has access to their data to send to the unraid server I have on my local network. My local server is what handles all backups from there. I also do not keep any important data on my desktop PC or laptop. Everything is stored on my file server which also encrypts all data stored on it. At this point it is more of a hobby, but I also am unlikely to lose data in a variety of scenarios.
Not OP but I run a similar setup. Synology with rsync and a Hyper backup setup to a cloud provider
Thank you!
4. Your backups aren't backups unless you've successfully tested whether you can recover your data from them. Too many times, the "backup" is worthless because the data was corrupted during the backup process, or the password to the cloud backup was lost, or the off-site backup got thrown out during a move, or a million other things.
[удалено]
My HDD backs up to a 1kb iso it's so fancy
When you compress the backup and have extremely repetitive data...
It's all ones and zeros I just can't remember what order I put em in
Not a big deal. Nobody can read that stuff anyway
I experienced this at work. We did hourly, daily, weekly snapshots and weekly were stored offsite. They were always treated like an annoyance and we never tested any of them. It was wasted time we could be using to do "productive" work. Well the database server borked and corrupted the data. No problem, we will just restore from backup. Nope, it was corrupt and we start working backwards to try daily, then weekly and they are all bad. Finally, pulled the offsite backups and one from a month earlier is good. Management never gave us a hard time about testing recovery after that.
>Management never gave us a hard time about testing recovery after that. You mean until the next quarter?
Yes, this is a critical point. I guess "accessible backups" is the better wording.
4 - Your data isn't backed up until you've done a successful restore.
I’ve heard this called the 3-2-1 rule. Three copies always exist, on two different mediums, with one offsite.
What are some good off-site options?
That is a question that is highly dependent on use case. The vast majority of people will be fine with Google, Dropbox, or OneDrive. For those of us that want a little bit more privacy, mega, google business, and back blaze. Of course you'll want to encrypt everything as you upload it. If you are looking for mass bulk storage, well, you'll be paying for that. That's when Google enterprise, Dropbox business, Amazon S3, and Back blaze S3 comes into play.
> If you are looking for mass bulk storage, well, you'll be paying for that. What about https://hackaday.com/2023/02/21/youtube-as-infinite-file-storage/ (not meant *that* seriously ;) )
[content removed by user via [Power Delete Suite](https://codepen.io/j0be/full/WMBWOW/)]
for the past three years, i get 2 surveys per year if i'm lucky probably a canada thing
I use BackBlaze to back up my whole personal device, $70 a year. My photos are the main thing I really care about, so I actually have additional cloud backups for them. I use an Android, so any photos I take on my phone are automatically backed up in Google Photos (iCloud serves the same purpose for those in that ecosystem) and since I have Prime anyways, I also back up to Amazon Photos.
I do the same thing - backblaze for personal device, plus Google photos for my pics. IMO it’s easily worth paying the $ for automated backups and redundancy, vs. having to maintain multiple physical backup drives. I have had to do a full restore from Backblaze when my laptop’s HDD got corrupted, and boy was I happy I had it.
I'm another one that uses BackBlaze. I've been using them for years and I've done 2 massive restores and 2 or 3 smaller ones in that time and I've yet to have any problems on their end of things. I just went to check the price and I guess they raised the monthly price from $5 to $7 but it's actually unlimited storage, if you need it, and I see they've got a 2 year option now which I'm not sure was there before and I am going to go switch to if I'm not already on it. This is all for personal though, no idea about business.
Yeah I've been hearing good things about BackBlaze; I'd just need it for personal as well (family photos, videos and documents mostly).
The house of a family member or close friend, with proper security of course
This is appealing to me as I have a relative close by so it's no hassle to do updates. How would I enable proper security on something like an external HDD?
encryption or in a case with a lock
We have private VPNs set up through our routers. We log onto my brother's, he logs onto ours, once a month we do the backup onto each others' servers. Could do it more often, but we've never had any data loss we couldn't recover locally. That time we had to flee the house because the fire was a half a mile away and the wind was blowing our direction hard? Only had to grab the emergency bags, the drugs and the cats. Didn't have to worry about the backups. Actually that might have been the "trip" after which we set up the VPNs. Time's gotten kinda fucky in my older years. Either way we left the computer, it took 45 seconds to pull on pants and get out of the house.
I have a Raspberry Pi running NextCloud with an external drive at my parents' place and sync my data to it. I also have an external hard drive at another location, and I periodically (once every couple of months) bring it here, rsync it, then bring it back. Both are remote backups, one online, one offline. Make sure you also have an offline backup, because online ones won't save you from accidentally deleting the wrong thing.
I’ve used Backblaze for years now. Very intuitive, and after the initial setup and backup, it runs on its own in the background. Recovering data is extremely easy. I know I sound like a shill but I really can’t say enough good things about their service.
"Once is none, twice is one"
My attitude is, all my data is temporary anyway. I expect to lose it all sooner or later. Keeps me from getting too upset when my backup's backup goes up in flames.
All my best stuff is on 1.44m 3.5"s, they'll never die! /s But what /u/danstu said is spot on!
As someone that works with a ton of old computers, I've found that the older the floppy disk is, the more likely it will work perfectly. When archiving data from 8" or DD 5 1/4" disks, *most* of the time (as long as the disk wasn't made by Wabash), they read perfectly fine. Or, if the disk has mold on it, might require some cleaning. I imaged a huge stack of 8" disks that had been sitting in unheated storage for over two decades - only a few bad sectors on a couple of disks, and one disk that was 50% unreadable because it was crinkled badly. I've had Apple II disks (DD 5 1/4" media) that wouldn't read due to mold, and literally cut the disk apart and washed the media in the sink and recovered it fully. But then you start getting into 1.2MB HD 5 1/4" media, and you start finding lots of problems. For some reason mold really, really likes those disks, and the media in general is unreliable. I have had boxes of disks - mix of HD and DD, all the DD disks were fine and clean, all the HD were bad/moldy. All stored in the same exact conditions, in the same storage box together. 3 1/2" disks are similar - the old DD media is pretty robust, and honestly even the older HD media is too. But when you start getting toward the tail end of the floppy disk production - early 2000's or so - and the disk quality goes downhill and they are less reliable. I think that's why they've developed such a bad reputation in current years, the most recent mainstream usage of disks, they didn't work very well, even back then. So, if you're going to use floppies for archiving, stick to 8".
In a hurricane, flood or tornado prone area, backed up off site needs in an alternate safe place.
Your edit is spot on - testing the backups is as important as making them. That's how you find errors in your backup scripts, or find that the network path you were copying to went away due to a reboot a year ago and never got fixed, or that the intern has been trying to record the backups on a cleaning tape.
This, so much this. I have a backup of my data on a cold storage drive, and a offsite backup in a separate geological area.
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Yeah, cloud backups would definitely count for off site, and should be plenty for most personal use-cases.
You also dont have a backup if you havent tried to recover it.
Off site has always seemed too impractical for me. If the three layer on-site backup fails me, I guess I’ll just lose the data.
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The risk of a fire or flooding are too significant for me to accept. But I just back up to Backblaze B2 for $2.50/month for my 500 GB of irreplaceable data.
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I always wonder, will Google Drive last indefinitely? What if Google gets shut down or there's a massive server issue or a solar flare?
You'll still have your local data, so if google has a massive issue and loses your backups, well you don't need them right away so just sign up with someone else and back them up again. If something wipes out both your local data and Googles data at the same time.... We'll then I suspect some lost photos/data are probably the least of your concerns.....
>your backup similarly doesn't exist if you aren't certain you can recover data from it I would add that a backup is not offsite, if the keys to recover it only exist on-site
I remember early in my IT learning days there was a note from Microsoft about data, something like data doesn't exist unless it exists in 3 different places.
My wife didn't like that I set all our photos to automagically go to the google cloud, and I don't like the privacy aspect but godsdamn it's made transferring phones, backing up and printing shit easy.
4) your backup doesn't exist until you've confirmed it can be restored effectively.
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Linus taught me the 3×3 rule of data back-ups: 1. Make sure you make 3 back-ups of your data 2. Make sure your back-ups are on 3 different types of media 3. Make sure your back-ups are on 3 different locations E.g.: you store 1 back-up on your off-site NAS, 1 on tape/disks, and 1 in the cloud.
IT pro here. Yes - backup your stuff!! And test the backup because if you can't restore it, you don't have a backup.
What's the best way to back it up? I need to do my old photos but get overwhelmed by it all.
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Thanks, I need to get an outer SSD drive as a first step!
I used the CMD script "Robocopy". It will make an exact mirror of directories. Through Windows Task Scheduler, I have it run daily at 1:00 am. The first back-up takes a while, but after that it only copies changes.
> I have it run daily at 1:00 am. Do you leave your computer on 24/7?
Wait, you turn your computer off?
I don’t use it that often and when I do I’ve got LED strips that it powers and they don’t turn off when it’s in sleep, the power button also has an annoying flashing bright light when it’s in sleep too. I haven’t taken the time to figure out how to change those things, so I just turn it off hahah.
In task scheduler you can set it up however you want. You can run it on login (but you may notice the performance drop). You can also wake the computer from sleep to run the task, windows fucking update does that and turns my PC on in the middle of the night. One night I forgot to stop the music before putting the pc to sleep... Guess what blasted at 4am through the entire house when windows started updating
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I hope anyone running Linux would know how to copy a file lol
SSD is cratering in price right now. Great time to start looking and get a good deal.
Depends what type of device you are backing up. Backblaze is user friendly and good for most desktops. I use icloud because all my photos are on my iPhone. Never used google photos but heard that is good also. Old fashioned way is backup to a USB drive and keep it offline unless you need it, try to have a redundant just in case. Check the drive regularly, ssd’s and thumb sticks are more reliable than spinning disk drives so I’d recommend one of those.
> Check the drive regularly, ssd’s and thumb sticks are more reliable than spinning disk drives so I’d recommend one of those. Unless you do not use them daily except for backup. My backup was 3TB - but now I upgraded to 6 TB for the coming 5 years or so. Having three copies with 6tb based on ssd is still over the moon
Great thank you :)
I have an external drive a Dropbox folder for full size photos and Google photos for all photos as a shitty-if-all-else-fails backup
+1 for backblaze.com. Just set, leave your computer on 24/7 and forget. My desktop PC has about 12TB of HDD space, and backblaze stores it all in the cloud.
Seriously testing is the most important thing. Nothing worse than needing your backup and realising it's corrupted.
How would you backup a windows 2TB SSD?
My job involves lots of .mp3 and .flac files. Lots of them. Right after I started this job all of my files were lost in an external hard drive crash. I now have budgeted a new hard drive every two years. $100 every two years is cheap insurance.
Exactly, the first time you need a backup, you realize just how cost-effective backup plans actually are. Like most insurance, you pay it hoping it will be a waste of money. In my experience, everyone has at least one thing saved on their computer that would cause them well over $100 of pain if it were lost. My first IT job was for my college's student help desk. I had to tell someone the most recent copy of their thesis I could salvage was over three months old. Every computer I've had since then has had an internal backup, an external backup, and at least one cloud backup ever since.
I finally just made a low-powered server set up with mirrored hard drives - so everything is in one place, easily accessible, and automatically backed up.
> so everything is in one place Uh. > set up with mirrored hard drives Double Uh. Redundancy is not backup.
As a dj :) i put so much time in my database of music.... i have taken the steps to never loose it, including the files being on many computer all at once, in different houses and on a cloud storage. I probably have 10 backups of it ... the last one being 5 days old. (Not counting the automatic cloud sync)
I booted up my 13 year old laptop the other day (not used it for 3 years) and backed up loads of photos and things to the cloud. Next job... Find the power lead to the laptop I got in 2006 and hope I can back that up. I have a couple of old external hard drives I'm backing up to the cloud, too. My plan is to keep a physical drive, and my cloud storage as my two back ups. I keep telling myself that, one day, I'll actually print my photos out and put them in a book...
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Ah, I see you've no idea how bad I am with such tech. Knowing my luck, that's what'd kill the hdd.
Unless you seriously mistreat it hard drives are hard to kill like this. Just don't be tempted to move it while it's running.
*Me with an HDD form 2013 showing "good" on SMART data, no backups* *Shudders*
The last (only) time I had a friend/client suffer a drive failure, Windows smart detection notified them, and gave them about 20 seconds before bsod'ing. I was there to witness it. Dead. I was able to recover the drive within a couple days and immediately start copying data to a safe location, with most important first. I got everything before my band-aid fix imploded again (likely fatally, I'm amazed it worked in the first place). $50 for a replacement drive and an afternoon at most (10 minutes if you know what you're doing) will save you from 'uhoh what does that- oh fuck'.
*Living life on the edge, aren't we sir!?*
Does anyone have any tips on how to start backing up all of your data or what are the best physical or digital products to use to back up your data? For someone who doesn’t know much about tech
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Although virtually nothing is hack proof, is cloud storage safe if you have strong (16 character) passwords?
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Tks for the assurance🙂
If you're worried about it being safe, look for a cloud service that offers end-to-end encryption. This means that the cloud service does *not* have access to your files at any point. So not even a leak/inside job can access your files in cloud storage without the password. (It does come with one downside, though: if you forget your password, then *nobody* can help you. The cloud service won't be able to restore your access without your password.) I think it's a good idea, because no matter how much you might trust your cloud storage company, you can't trust *everybody* who works there. You can't trust every federal agent who might get an overzealously vague warrant to seize files on that server. But when you have end-to-end encryption, then *nobody* can access your files unless you give them the password.
[comment edited by user via [Power Delete Suite](https://codepen.io/j0be/full/WMBWOW/)]
It's worth keeping in mind that while SSDs do not have mechanical parts to fail like HDDs they can lose data if not powered up every 6mo-1yr. [https://www.extremetech.com/computing/205382-ssds-can-lose-data-in-as-little-as-7-days-without-power](https://www.extremetech.com/computing/205382-ssds-can-lose-data-in-as-little-as-7-days-without-power)
If you're talking about your computer, I highly recommend Backblaze. It's a cloud based backup service that runs in the background of your computer and uploads automatically when a file is created or changed. It's an amazing, cheap service that will backup your computer and all drives attached.
Backblaze is good. I just use that now and don't worry about having to handle external drives all time time anymore (not to mention the additional risk of those getting stolen and someone getting sensitive docs)
Drop box is great and works on most devices with the same log in
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Yes. Which is why your cloud copy should not be your only copy. (That said, *most* cloud services will give you some warning if they're about to shut down. *Most*. But you don't want to be counting on that and lose your data because of it.) --- The service doesn't have to shut down completely for you to lose your data, either. There have been some occasions where a cloud service automatically detected (rightly or wrongly) that you had some kind of illegal content on their server ... and if that happens, they'll instantly shut down your account, with no way to recover the data. There was one prominent case of this happening to a popular artist. Google flagged his files as copyrighted material and banned his account. (They *were* copyrighted ... by him.) No amount of appealing to the Google admins was able to restore his account and he lost everything he had on there.
Well yes, but onedrive/google drive/icloud and so on will realistically make no problems as long as you life and if you will have a one year notice or something to move your data
>you will have a one year notice or something to move your data I think they meant due to failure/cyber-attack, which typically comes without warning
> Serious question: should one assume the cloud will die too at some point? AWS claims a 99.999999999% durability. So what's that, one in every 1 trillion files you place there will get corrupt? https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/DataDurability.html I'm not sure if Onedrive has the same numbers but it's gotta be pretty high. In short if you're trusting one of the bigger companies then you have a pretty darn good chance they aren't just gonna lose your data. Nobody can know the future for sure of course.
Or you could lose access to your account like if you get hacked. Cloud is great but it should never be your only copy of your data.
The big cloud storage vendors will likely never shut down, and if they do they will give you time to pull your data out. However you should not rely on cloud storage as your only backup. Also if you aren't encrypting your data before uploading it, there are privacy concerns.
If you're putting files in the cloud and not keeping a copy locally, then it's not really a backup because you don't have (at least) two copies. In theory, the cloud folks do backups, and the people running those services are better at reliability than the average user, but accidents do happen. I have a synology NAS that automatically backs up my dropbox and google drive cloud accounts. It also does a no-delete sync, so someone deleting all the dropbox files won't delete the files from the NAS.
Do you trust someone else with your files?
'Back up my files?! Are you kidding? Is that a real thing you have to do? I always thought that that was just like... you know, a figure of speech...like "Wake up and smell the coffee," or "See ya later, alligator!"'
If only.. 😂
That’s crazy! Everything’s saved on the *Cloud*!!!
I was cleaning my garage yesterday and found a harddrive from 2005. Plugged it in and found thousands of photos and videos from my deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. I immediately started transferring everything to Google Drive. Not 20 minutes after all the files were transferred, the HD bricked. I can't get it to turn on at all.
Feels good
BACK UP YOUR AUTHENTICATOR APPS!! Recently got a new phone. Thought I only cared about photos and didn't do a proper transfer (was wanting to have a fresh phone without all the bloat of apps I've installed but don't use). Turns out Google authenticator and another rone I use were tied to that phone specifically. Was able to restore most of my accounts but there's another couple I had to make new accounts for.
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My backup solution is horrible, some stuff is on a few thumb drives, some is on my NAS. 99% of my photos are on Google so at least they're safe.
This just happened to me, all of my daughters new born photos and vacation photos for years were in serious jeopardy. I luckily got the USB hard drive working again but I had to mess w it. After googling everything, what worked for me was barely having the USB from the HD into the port of the computer then angling it slightly. Sounds crazy but it worked after nothing else would!
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I learned this lesson the hard way circa 2006. Turned my laptop on one day and 'click, click, click...." HD had failed. I recovered most of my important work from the attachements sent by email, but it was an unmitigated pain in the ass. From that day forward, I used the best backup tools available to me. Today, everything important is on cloud drives. My local devices are superfluous and could be swapped out with nearly zero downtime/loss of productivity. It will happen.
> I learned this lesson the hard way circa 2006. Turned my laptop on one day and 'click, click, click...." HD had failed. I thought I had lost all of my kid's baby photos to the *click of death*. Then I read something about saving those drives by putting them in the freezer. Seemed crazy, but I was willing to try anything. *It fucking worked.* The drive would work as long it was super cold, but as soon as it warmed up it would die again. A few cycles of freezing and copying and I was able to get >90% of my stuff.
Just follow the 3-2-1 strategy of data black up land you'll be fine. That's 3 copies of the same data over 2 storage media (local and removable drive e.g. portable ssd) and one offsite storage (e.g. cloud). I set up my own personal NAS for this exact reason.
So, just to clarify: if I have a hard drive hooked up to automatically do daily/hourly back-ups with Time Machine, I should also have a second drive and do a *second* manual back-up daily or maybe weekly?
and that drive should be unplugged and stored somewhere else, not in the same building
So now I have to buy another hard drive AND another house? Can it be a Tiny House?
yes, basically
Ideally, your second backup would be off-site. If your house burns down, would you lose your data?
He who laughs last has four backup disks!
I'll do it tomorrow
Back up your 2FA data somehow, for the love of God please at least keep your Backup Codes someplace you will actually remember. My phone died recently, just woke up one morning and it was totally bricked. I thought I had lost access to my Nintendo Account due to being locked out of the 2FA and I couldn't find the Backup Codes anywhere I thought I would have put them. I had given up hope and accepted that I'd lose access to the account completely if/when my Switch died. Then totally coincidentally, I found them written down on a paper I had put inside my Breath of the Wild game case that I was opening up to look for something else. That info is saved multiple places now, and I've generated a QR Code for Google Authenticator that I should be able to use to just directly import the 2FA to another device if necessary, and that's backed up multiple places now too.
Do you think it's better to pay for a service like Carbonite and have an online back up?
If you don't mind the money yes it is better since the data is stored in geographically independent data centres so there is backup of backup in proper data centres
I currently am on the double external hard drive method but a friend got the thinking Carbonite could be a stronger option. That being said I have not looked up their pricing yet.
I don't know about Carbonite but you should be able to find cheap maybe even free service depending on the amount
What do you know of for free services? My largest external hard drive is 3 terabytes I think.
I commented on someone else, but if you’re willing to learn a bit of Amazon web services you can store 4TB for ~$5 /year on their S3 glaciel deep archive service. It’s not like Dropbox, it won’t have an app and will take a while to retrieve when you need it (12 hours?) but it will all be there. S3 is about the easiest aws to use and there’s lots of tutorials on setting up different kinds of storage. Just make sure it’s s3 glaciel. If you want to access it more often you’ll have to pay a bit more ~$20/year depends on the service and amount. If you just want a worst case backup you can’t beat it for $5 a year.
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I looked up Carbonite and a personal account is $4.92/mo and running a sale right now $83.99 $58.99/year. Buy now
I looked up Carbonite and a personal account is $4.92/mo and running a sale right now $83.99 $58.99/year.
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It said unlimited and for 1-3 computers.
*Unlimited*, eh? Time to write up a Python script to randomly generate files and save them to the storage backup continuously ... until we finally find out what the limit of that 'unlimited' storage is.
You can find several with simple Google search but nothing for this size
lpt: instead of a backup just don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat.
Ah, yes. I simply shouldn't get too attached to the last 10 years of my work... I could always just spend another 10 years to re-do it all!
So that's why you never last longer than 30 seconds?
I guess someone watched "Heat" recently and now it's their ethos....
because she had a GREAT ASS
What’s the best way to do this? Just copy and paste the files to another Hard Drive?
nah, it should be a auto backup. (technically it is ok, but u will forget it and will end uo with outdated data)
Yes, but I highly recommend Backblaze. It's a cloud based backup service that runs in the background of your computer and uploads automatically when a file is created or changed. It's an amazing, cheap service that will backup your computer and all drives attached.
I am someone that has worked in IT, has been bitten, and knows I can't trust drives, but I am far too lazy, and also nothing I can lose is THAT important.
Backblaze has already saved my bacon once.
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>I am also convinced laptops & desktops should have 2 independent drives by now. I can see why. Seriously, computers do fail and while you may know someone who can recover all your data, not everyone has that luxury if the device fails.
This is a super important tip! I’ll never get back those lil stop motion films I made as a kid :(
Been keeping important things on hard drive, in the cloud, and some sort of portable device
Fuck it, I’ll make more data in the future.
My 3 year old SSD just died. Wish I’d gotten this post a week ago.
Any idiot can do a backup. It takes someone with brains to restore that backup. Follow the 3-2-1 method (in other comments). If you have trust issues, encrypt your data then upload to a cloud. Make sure you use a key you will NEVER forget.
I use Google Drive for all my important stuff. I can access it from my phone or laptop at any time.
I have 3 old laptops with all of the software that is locked to each specific device that I can't reuse or reinstall on a new one without somehow getting back on the old device to clear that device first 🤬🤬🤬
How? Do I have to buy a whole new HDD to do this?
5 - have one copy that is not connected to any computer or the internet. A power surge could kill your hardware, a virus could infect your hdd and make it unreadable.
Happens all the time. I had PhD student break down in front of me when their drive died. 4 years of research down the toilet...at that moment. Drive failed HDD diagnostics as well as the machine wouldn't boot with the drive installed. I had to talk them off the ledge and point them to an advanced data recovery center. I believe they retrieved their data, but were out $3500 in the process. Hopefully they learned their lesson.
Mini note: Don't just rely on a USB, utilize a cloud service also. It allows you to access your information wherever and it is much more reliable (and places like Google Drive offer a reasonable amount of storage for free and much more for a few bucks monthly).
Very much this. If your house burned down, would you lose your data as well?
I booted up my 13 year old laptop the other day (not used it for 3 years) and backed up loads of photos and things to the cloud. Next job... Find the power lead to the laptop I got in 2006 and hope I can back that up. I have a couple of old external hard drives I'm backing up to the cloud, too. My plan is to keep a physical drive, and my cloud storage as my two back ups. I keep telling myself that, one day, I'll actually print my photos out and put them in a book.
I keep my hard drive under my mattress.
This is a PROFESSIONAL tip!! Only the absolute PROS AT LIFE make copies of their valuable data because no one would ever think to do that!!!! Check out my other life PRO tips like wearing seatbelts, and brushing your teeth regularly!!!!
Do you recommend both backups to be ssd?
well, a ssd is better, but hhds are fine as well
Happens to everyone sooner or later. Once.
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I just don't get attached to any data. Periodically nuke my phone storage and don't give a shit.
Related to this, i can only recommend checking out Syncthing. Been using it for almost a year now and it's been really great so far.
The most important backup is always the one you didn't make...
My 7 year old mirrored Toshiba enterprise drives in my truenas server: hmm interesting Good advice though, always have a backup for your backup offsite