Open Thread, January 4-10, 2016

polymathwannabe

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

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 RAID on ZFS. RAID is not a backup solution, but with the proper RAIDZ6 configuration will protect you against common hard drive failure scenarios. Put all your files on ZFS. I use a dedicated FreeNAS file server for my home storage. Once everything you have is on ZFS, turn on snapshotting. I have my NAS configured to take a snapshot every hour during the day (set to expire in a week), and one snapshot on Monday which lasts 18 months. The short lived snapshots lets me quickly recover from brain snafus like overwriting a file.

Long lived snapshotting is a... (read more)

1Lumifer10y

Generally speaking, the best practice is to have two separate backups, one of them offsite. First, you might want to run some kind of a RAID setup so that a single disk failure doesn't affect much. RAID is not backup, but it's useful. Second, you might want to set up some automated backup/copy of your data to a different machine or to a cloud. The advantage is that it's setup-and-forget. The disadvantage is that if you have data corruption or malware, etc. the corrupted data could overwrite your clean backup before you notice something is wrong. Because of that it would not be a bad idea to occasionally make known-clean copies of data (say, after a disk check and a malware check) on some offline media like a flash drive or an external hard drive. Disk space is really REALLY cheap. It's not rational :-/ to skimp on it.

0ChristianKl10y

I consider either tresoit or megaupload currently to be the best ways to backup data automatically both provide clientside encryption. The free version of megaupload allows for 50GB.

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