Also: don't wait until you got the perfect setup. A bad/incomplete backup is better than no backup.
THIS! RIGHT HERE!
When I was young and naive about digital things, I had NO BACKUP
One day I got a new laptop. Yay me. Transfer all the data from my old hard drive using some jank-ass local network setup because young and dumb about tech still.
Six months go by, and my new laptop shit itself. Still no idea what happened, but it BSODd and a factory reset got it working again.
I still had my old laptop, so after about a week of searching on forums and reading everything I could find about how to build a pc, how laptop internals compare, data transfers, and literally anything I could so I could pull the old hard drive out without damaging anything and get at least some of my data without issue...
I lost 6 months of new stuff on a much more capable laptop, but it's better than losing EVERYTHING.
This is something I should be doing.
I need quite a lot of space for backups and I don't have enough space for them. I should at least start with partial backups with whatever I can fit in the storage I have.
My weak point right now is off-site, and homelab. My homelab isn't backed up at all, and my personal data is only backed up on-site.
It's better than nothing, but I should be doing better. I work in IT afterall. I think this is in the same vein as the mechanics car....
“Son, the time has finally come. Today I’m going to teach you TNO (Trust No One) security.”
my two-year-old stares blankly at me
They'll be ready to learn about Cryptography, Chains Of Trust and Two Channel Authentication by the age of 3!
Testing restore time is a key part of being a miracle worker. That way you can tell them it’ll take three times as long.
Need to factor in the buffer time
Scotty, is that you?
looks at my raid of HDDs backing up my raid of SSDs
also before everyone slaps me with "why aren't you using zfs?" it's because I keep swapping out drives and testing various file systems whenever they get new features, which mdadm will accept even with the most insane unreccomended setups.
Also using it in my mad pursuit to figure out what Stratis is supposed to be useful for.
I like to annoy my IT friends by saying my backup strategy is chucking what little important data I have in my free Dropbox account.
It's not even that important; I don't care!
Why does that annoy them? That's an off-site backup.
For one it's not a full, real backup strategy. That's supposed to include multiple tiers.
Also it's instantly synced, so if I bonk my stuff locally, it could be bonked over there and history might not be able to save me depending on the situation.
And I guess if Dropbox dies my data dies.
Some people take their data seriously enough to worry about that kind of stuff. I don't.
Heard a lot of horror stories of sites promising a free tier, then making the free tier a lower storage space and locking accounts that go over after a while.
Dropbox is not the best, but if you manage backups properly by storing in more than one space, then its fine.
least it's better than using chess
If you want to annoy them, tell them you just take snapshots as your backup strategy.
I mean sure you could be sync'ing your snapshots elsewhere as a real backup strategy but you don't need to tell them that.
Experienced that recently. Every part of the backup was fine, except for the one with all the 2fa codes. Fun times.
My house burned down right after building my first raid array. It hadn't even been put into use. The plan was to move all the data from assorted servers, desktops and laptops in my house to the array THEN backup that volume to something offsite. /sigh
I have a RPi running nextcloud and a second RPi rsyncing all the files weekly from it, nothing off-site, but at least it's two separate drives on different machines. Anything that I can improve here(cheaply)?
You might consider what you would do if your source has an issue that syncs the to your off-site copy. If it isn’t a lot of data, you might want to keep another copy or two in either location that is created at a less frequent schedule but would give you a fall back.
As an example, if your files got ransomware encrypted and then sync’d to the off-site location, how would you recover your data?
my backup is once in a while manually borging my files onto this chonk, but i have plans to improve on that
It INFURIATES me how many companies will spend money on backups, but not ever test that their backups restore or allow for continued functionality afterwards.
At one company, I banged this drum for years, and one day we had a situation where someone "accidentally" deleted all the media from a client website. I had to dig through several backups and rebuild from beta, which annoyed me endlessly, but I dropped the "I fucking told you so" several times, and hinted that our "restore scripts weren't working as intended" to the client. It took me a full day to do what should have taken maybe 1-2 hours at most...
Who is still using raid? It's not 2006.
I have something resembling RAID5 in my NAS. 4 drives, 1 drive failure tolerance.
👋
raidz2 here. Still learning. What alternative should I look into?
Unless you want to go to large scale cluster storage systems, nothing.
Raid is the best way to get disk-level redundancy for a disk volume.
I'm mainly using RAID 6, but I'm still using a lot of SATA drives. I'll probably need to go with one of the software raids, like z2 when I move away from SATA.
Raid is no longer viable as a performance component, but it is completely viable for redundancy. Large scale cluster storage like Ceph is the way forward for anything larger than what can fit in a single chassis, or a single disk controller. Basically if you have or need more than one 45 drive chassis for storage, look into Ceph.
For everything less, RAID, and if you don't need redundancy and just want performance, just get a high end NVMe drive and do backups.
ZFS
Alright. I have a confession to make..I actually DID make sure my eldest son heard ALL of these things.... (And more, but wow..the WHOLE list...)
#proudNerdDadMoment
I lost a devastating bunch of data when I was very young. Lots of it irreplaceable. Since then I've always tried to have a redundant backup strategy
But is #7 true if they don't have a backup?
Omg, other people need to
hearunderstand this.The amount of times we define a DRP procedure, testing times and so on, just to be told "it's not THAT important" is staggering to say the least.
At that point I figure backups are the least of my worries. These people like to live on the EDGE
