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Baughn comments on Open Thread, January 4-10, 2016 - Less Wrong
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PSA: I had a hard drive die on me. Recovered all my data with about 25 hours of work all up for two people working together.
Looking back on it I doubt many things could have convinced me to improve my backup systems; short of working in the cloud; my best possible backups would have probably lost the last two weeks of work at least.
I am taking suggestions for best practice; but also a shout out to backups, and given it's now a new year, you might want to back up everything before 2016 right now. Then work on a solid backing up system.
(Either that or always keep 25 hours on hand to manually perform a ddrescue process on separate sectors of a drive; unplugging and replugging it in between each read till you get as much data as possible out, up until 5am for a few nights trying to scrape back the entropy from the bits...) I firmly believe with the right automated system it would take less than 25 hours of effort to maintain.
bonus question: what would convince you to make a backup of your data?
Use a backup system that automatically backs up your data, and then nags at you if the backup fails. Test to make sure that it works.
For people who don't want / can't run their own, I've found that Crashplan is a decent one. It's free, if you only back up to other computers you own (or other peoples' computers); in my case I've got one server in Norway and one in Ireland. There have, however, been some doubts about Crashplan's correctness in the past.
There are also about half a dozen other good ones.
Links? I use Crashplan and would be interested in learning about its bugs.
Google for 'crashplan data loss', and you'll find a few anecdotes. The plural of which isn't "data", but it's enough to ensure that I wouldn't use it for my own important data if I wasn't running two backup servers of my own for it. Even then, I'm also replicating with Unison to a ZFS filesystem that has auto-snapshots enabled. In fact, my Crashplan backups are on the same ZFS setup (two machines, two different countries), so I should be covered against corruption there as well.
Suffice to say, I've been burnt in the past. That seems to be the only way that anyone ever starts spending this much (that is, 'sufficient') effort on backups.
E.g. http://jeffreydonenfeld.com/blog/2011/12/crashplan-online-backup-lost-my-entire-backup-archive/
All of that said?
I'm paranoid. I wouldn't trust a single backup service, even if it had never had any problems; I'd be wondering what they were covering up, or if they were so small, they'd likely go away.
Crashplan is probably fine. Probably.
I'm using Crashplan as the offsite backup, I have another backup in-house. The few anecdotes seem to be from Crashplan's early days.
But yeah, maybe I should do a complete dump to an external hard drive once in a while and just keep it offline somewhere...