Always have backups!

[Red Squirrel]

Even if you use the cloud.

“Unprecedented” Google Cloud event wipes out customer account and its backups

UniSuper, a $135 billion pension account, details its cloud compute nightmare.

arstechnica.com

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Nah, live dangerously.

Nothing like trusting your entire life's photo album to a $15 Dogfish SSD.

Will it be there tomorrow? I dunno, let me check...

 

[Torn Mind]

Nah, live dangerously.

Nothing like trusting your entire life's photo album to a $15 Dogfish SSD.

Will it be there tomorrow? I dunno, let me check...

Barebackups?

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Worked at a computer store years ago. Little old lady came in.

"I need you to recover all of my photos of my grandchildren from this external hardrive"

"Hmm, it's dead ma'am, did you keep back-ups?"

"Well, yes, I put all my photos on the external hard drive, that's backing the photos up right?"

*Increasingly panicked tone in my voice* "yes, but where are you keeping the originals? You have an extra set of these photos on your actual computer right?!"

"No that's why I have the external hard drive, I back up all my photos by saving them there"

"Ma'am the photos of your grandkids are gone, here is the number of a data recovery shop, they might be able to get something for you..."

 

[biostud]

I have 200GB in a rar archive on floppies

I use onedrive and and external hard-drive for backups.

 

[mikeymikec]

Worked at a computer store years ago. Little old lady came in.

"I need you to recover all of my photos of my grandchildren from this external hardrive"

"Hmm, it's dead ma'am, did you keep back-ups?"

"Well, yes, I put all my photos on the external hard drive, that's backing the photos up right?"

*Increasingly panicked tone in my voice* "yes, but where are you keeping the originals? You have an extra set of these photos on your actual computer right?!"

"No that's why I have the external hard drive, I back up all my photos by saving them there"

"Ma'am the photos of your grandkids are gone, here is the number of a data recovery shop, they might be able to get something for you..."

I've had a few cases of that where the customer said that they thought the data would be safer on an external hard drive.

---

One of my customers is part of an organisation where someone else has stuck their nose in technical day-to-day IT matters, and so my customer ended up with a cheap Chinese NUC with an SSD whose model name is "SSD" and their data stuck in a cloud account. I tried to explain to the person who stuck their nose in about backups and his response was, "well I've never had any problems with this cloud provider". I blinked at him several times in a way that I would normally reserve for a customer whom I'm hoping will realise that they've done the equivalent of inadvertently putting butter in the freezer, but it didn't help.

 

[pmv]

I have multiple backups of things (on blu-ray disks, on external hard-drives and on memory cards), but as I'm, frankly, a digital-hoarder, it takes a lot of space (both virtual and physical) and it gets quite difficult to keep track of it all.

The main worry I have, is that as I generally do incremental backups, what if the originals get silently corrupted, thus when I run the backup job it will over-write the backup with the 'changed' corrupted version?

 

[lxskllr]

The main worry I have, is that as I generally do incremental backups, what if the originals get silently corrupted, thus when I run the backup job it will over-write the backup with the 'changed' corrupted version?

That's what I think about too. Not sure of a way around that without tedious manual work, and a stack of harddrives to use as archives, which would waste a bunch of money.

 

[lxskllr]

I was just thinking about it, and you could probably checksum the files, then have a program flag discrepancies for manual intervention. That's a lot of time crunching numbers, and adds hassle. Things that are a hassle tend to not get done.

 

[sdifox]

I was just thinking about it, and you could probably checksum the files, then have a program flag discrepancies for manual intervention. That's a lot of time crunching numbers, and adds hassle. Things that are a hassle tend to not get done.

Par2

 

[mikeymikec]

I have multiple backups of things (on blu-ray disks, on external hard-drives and on memory cards), but as I'm, frankly, a digital-hoarder, it takes a lot of space (both virtual and physical) and it gets quite difficult to keep track of it all.

The main worry I have, is that as I generally do incremental backups, what if the originals get silently corrupted, thus when I run the backup job it will over-write the backup with the 'changed' corrupted version?

I once had a similar situation with a customer whereby a spreadsheet that hadn't been intentionally altered in several years was opened and found to be corrupted. My backup system had backed up the corrupted copy so no help there, and it was only because I had taken an extra backup when migrating their previous computer's data to their current one that I was able to recover it.

For my own backups, I have a bunch of second-hand hard drives that I cycle between for my general backups then an extra drive which is backed up to yearly. I have other backups too like to DVD (and a happy little spreadsheet with dates and summaries of backup contents). At the end of the day, unless you allocate an absurd budget, time and physical space, you can't be guarded against every possible outcome.

 

[IronWing]

I have external drive backups but I need to start storing at least one offsite. I know how that is going to go, which is to say, the offsite backup ain't going to get updated very often.

 

[highland145]

I take the drive home every day. My problem is that I need to inspect want I expect. I assume the data is good....

 

[GodisanAtheist]

I think the golden rule is always three sets of Data in three separate places.

So for most people that would mean docs/files/photos on the c: drive, a cloud back-up, and then an external hard drive that you keep in a fireproof safe or something.

 

[mikeymikec]

I have external drive backups but I need to start storing at least one offsite. I know how that is going to go, which is to say, the offsite backup ain't going to get updated very often.

I take one of my DVD backups with me to work, so it's out of the house probably 75% of the time I am.

 

[pmv]

I once had a similar situation with a customer whereby a spreadsheet that hadn't been intentionally altered in several years was opened and found to be corrupted. My backup system had backed up the corrupted copy so no help there, and it was only because I had taken an extra backup when migrating their previous computer's data to their current one that I was able to recover it.

For my own backups, I have a bunch of second-hand hard drives that I cycle between for my general backups then an extra drive which is backed up to yearly. I have other backups too like to DVD (and a happy little spreadsheet with dates and summaries of backup contents). At the end of the day, unless you allocate an absurd budget, time and physical space, you can't be guarded against every possible outcome.

Yeah, it did actually happen to me, when some of my music and audiobook collection got mysteriously turned into zero-length files after some disk problems.

Actually noticed it had happened because after I next ran a backup the backup log mentioned it had overwritten the uncorrupted files in the backup with the 'new' zero-length versions - and fortunately happened to have those particular files backed up in various other places as well. Probably wouldn't have noticed in time if I hadn't happened to glance through the backup log.

The whole issue is kind of an exercise in coming to terms with the impermanence of all things, though.

 

[IBMJunkman]

Everything associated with my website is on at least 1 thumb drive in my safe. Every time I shut down my PC my important files are copied to a drive based on day of week. Yes, I have 7 drives for the purpose.

 

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

I've tried to ask this question a few times and have never gotten an answer I understand.


Malware can be on a system for days, weeks or months before dropping the payload.

Let's say you do weekly backups. You get slammed and corrupted. You try to restore from a backup thinking your safe, only to be hit again in a few days.

How do you know how far back the malware was loaded? Last week, two weeks back, a month back? Which backup is safe?

 

[Paperdoc]

Really good backup systems accomplish what they are supposed to so well, we rarely hear about the cases where they WORKED and prevented a catastrophe. There may be millions of those "Whew! We survived" stories. I have two tales of good systems that failed (or almost) to illustrate where weaknesses can still cause a problem.

The first goes back to about 1970 when I was a graduate student in a small university, and the major computer system was an IBM System 360 model 50 mainframe. They maintained routine backups on in-house tape drives. One Friday afternoon a part-time young system programmer tested out a file maintenance routine to delete from the on-line disk packs old abandoned files as specified in a set of punched cards. He made a significant design error in the software and ended up deleting ALL files from those disks! All Hands On Deck! They loaded up the backup tapes and were shocked to find they could not be read! Apparently the routines to write the backup files to tape had an error! And this under a system operations management program that was in use widely throughout North America, and NOBODY had reported this before! So they set to work trying to figure out what error could be involved on the hypothesis that they could read the records and correct the errors in it. Another young whiz kid wrote a short machine-language routine that worked the first time! Incredible luck there. The staff spent nearly all weekend 24/7 and managed to restore everything from the tapes so that only a small fraction of data from Friday was lost.

The second tale from the early 2000's was in a paper mill where I worked. They routinely wrote backups daily to tape on-site, and also sent backups by a data landline to a commercial service at a remote site. One day the main data storage system (a RAID5 system on local hard disks) crashed due to failure of one HDD. Now, normally in such a system the failed unit can be replaced and the entire system restored from the four drives that had not failed. First stalling point was that the local IBM office did not have any HDD of that type in stock and the replacement had to be flown in. When that was installed, it still failed to restore because they discovered that a SECOND HDD had failed earlier and nobody ever saw a notice of that! So they had to wait for shipment of a second replacement unit. Once that was installed the restoration process could proceed from the local tapes. It took another couple of days to complete this, and only part of the last day before failure was lost.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I've tried to ask this question a few times and have never gotten an answer I understand.


Malware can be on a system for days, weeks or months before dropping the payload.

Let's say you do weekly backups. You get slammed and corrupted. You try to restore from a backup thinking your safe, only to be hit again in a few days.

How do you know how far back the malware was loaded? Last week, two weeks back, a month back? Which backup is safe?

That can be a very tricky one. The only way to really protect from that is to have super long retention, but most home users probably don't do that. I have been meaning to fully revamp my backup solution so I can make use of many small hard drives to basically run diff backups, and then I would setup some very long retention. All the solutions I looked at look really complicated to setup so I'll probably write my own.

May even get a LTO drive at some point too, I would use tapes mostly for archiving permanently.

That's the other thing too, very good idea to actually TEST backups once in a while. Make sure they're actually running, and that it's getting all the data you want, and that the media is not full and the job is just failing. That's the tricky bit with my current solution, sometimes the source grows behind the size of the drive associated with a given backup job then I need to start splitting stuff up and it gets tedious. Going to write a solution that automates all that.

 

[mikeymikec]

I've tried to ask this question a few times and have never gotten an answer I understand.


Malware can be on a system for days, weeks or months before dropping the payload.

Let's say you do weekly backups. You get slammed and corrupted. You try to restore from a backup thinking your safe, only to be hit again in a few days.

How do you know how far back the malware was loaded? Last week, two weeks back, a month back? Which backup is safe?

People talking about backups may be talking about two different things: system state backups and personal data backups. I only bother doing personal data backups because the rest *should* be reproducible from definitive sources.

"Should" is emphasized because I normally keep as many installer files locally as I practically can because I don't trust what a software maker might do with their software (particularly older versions) in the future.

It's been well over 20 years since my system was hit with a malware infection; at the time I let Norton AV clean it up. I don't remember if I followed up with a clean install.

Horses for courses I guess, it depends on the circumstances in which the infection occurred. It certainly would be a curious set of circumstances to spot a hitherto unspotted malware infection that I had no idea when the original infection occurred, it would also depend on the severity and scope of the attack. I personally cannot remember the last time I saw a malware attack that targeted every file it could find; these days that behaviour is more confined to ransomware attacks in my experience.

 

[manly]

I have multiple backups of things (on blu-ray disks, on external hard-drives and on memory cards), but as I'm, frankly, a digital-hoarder, it takes a lot of space (both virtual and physical) and it gets quite difficult to keep track of it all.

The main worry I have, is that as I generally do incremental backups, what if the originals get silently corrupted, thus when I run the backup job it will over-write the backup with the 'changed' corrupted version?

Dedicated backup software is pretty sophisticated nowadays. Synology NAS has Hyper Backup, so in theory I could recover even if the NAS itself failed. A couple important features are:

• multiple file versioning with configurable retention policy
• backup integrity check

We're supposed to test restoration every once in a while just to make sure our backups are working correctly.

Although the up-front cost isn't trivial, it sounds like you could benefit from a consumer NAS with an automated backup for it. Consumers can buy server-pulled enterprise HDD for fairly cheap:

http://www.portvapes.co.uk/?id=Latest-exam-1Z0-876-Dumps&exid=threads/someone-is-upgrading-their-storage-servers.2617634/

 

[Brainonska511]

This reminded me to run the backup to my external drive, which I hadn't done in a long time.

Current setup is: OneDrive, occasional mirroring of data to another internal drive, and periodic copying to an external drive.

 

[WilliamM2]

I keep all files and photos on a separate drive in the computer (D: )and have everything backed up to 3 more external drives. Images are stored the same way, but on D: and V: in the computer, and on 2 of the external drives. Still use mostly mechanical drives for external backups.
I never use thumb drives for backup.

 

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

I have a duplicate/identical laptop set up. I did a full backup of this one and restored it to the other. Then I use FileSync to compare and adjust files between the two units. That keeps a more or less hot swap unit ready to go. It may only be a few days off (or weeks as in the recent case when I got lazy), but most everything is there.

I also keep just the files for Quicken and LibreOffice duplicated on a thumb drive.

Tho only other thing 'critical' is the passwords and logins for various websites. Most of those are in multiple browsers, on different devices and in an text file.