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The old backup thread has gone to archives, but backing up your data is still important! Why do you need backups? - Data are deleted and overwritten by stupid mistakes, backups prevent those from becoming disasters. - Data are destroyed by malicious intent, be it a disgruntled employee, or your great-grandmother clicking an email-attachment with a crypto virus. - Hardware fails, taking the data with it. - Hardware is destroyed or lost by fire, earthquake, theft, etc. What is a backup? You need data stored in more than one copy, the copies need to be separated so changes to one copy do not automatically transfer to other copies, and the backup needs to be restorable so you can actually get your data back when necessary. It's generally also a good idea to encrypt the backups, if the data is important, so theft is less of a risk. And you generally want to keep geographically separated copies so a disaster at one location doesn't prevent you from restoring. RAID IS NOT A BACKUP! Using RAID for storage in a set of harddisks can be fine for higher availability in case of hardware failure, but it fails the requirement that changes to one copy do not propagate to other copies, and does not protect against physical incidents (like fire, electrical damage, etc.) either. Always keep a real backup too. CLOUD SYNC SERVICES ARE NOT BACKUP! (Dropbox, OneDrive, and the like.) They have the same problem that changes synchronize, and it's often possible for an attacker to intentionally destroy your online data. It typically also only syncs data under a specific folder, not anything you choose. YOUR BACKUP DOES NOT WORK UNTIL YOU HAVE TESTED IT CAN RESTORE! Have a plan for how often you test your restore procedure. Make sure you can get access to your backup, retrieve a file from it, and the file contains the correct data. Don't just test once. Keep testing. Your media might go bad, someone might have destroyed the data, or maybe your backup procedure is failing silently. Cloud or local? - Cloud backup, i.e. sending your data to a third-party hosting service, is easy to get in to, can usually run with very little oversight, and can be very cheap depending on amount of data. The most obvious disadvantage is that it requires a good upload rate on your internet connection to not take forever. - Local backup, to disk drives or to tape, requires up-front investment, more configuration, and manual janitoring in monitoring the media and keeping the media safe. Advantage is typically higher transfer speeds, and direct control over physical security of the backed up data. Also not handing over data to a third party, even encrypted. Do not use SSD for offline backups. Flash memory cells degrade slowly when not actively maintained. Leaving an SSD without power for months can have a significant risk of data becoming unreadable. Magnetic harddrives are the best choice. Tape can be an option if you have huge amounts of data and can afford the cost of entry. Recommended services In the old thread, Duplicati was recommended often as a backup client, capable of many different targets. Especially pairing it with Blackblaze B2 cloud storage was suggested. In this setup, the software is free, and you pay per gigabyte per month of data backed up. Other recommendations welcome! ---- My own question: I'd like to have offline backups at home, and imagine having a set of external harddrives I rotate between backing up to at home and keeping safe in my locker at work. E.g. rotating every Monday. Does anyone have experience with this kind of setup? Is it a good/bad idea and are there any pitfalls? For external harddrives used in a multiple backup-sets setup like this, would cheap USB 2.5" drives be okay, or smarter to use a dock or the like and use 3.5" internal desktop drives? nielsm fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Sep 25, 2018 |
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Sep 25, 2018 16:29
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If you hope the archive will be write-only, and never need to fetch data from it under normal circumstances, Amazon Glacier is likely more appropriate. It's intended for backup and archive usage where you'll rarely need to fetch data, and it's okay to have a delay measured in hours between request and delivery.
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Oct 31, 2018 17:40
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https://www.duplicati.com/articles/FactSheet/quote:Basic: Online Backup Verification
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Dec 8, 2018 09:29
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As in using Dropbox Business as a backup destination, so the working copy of your data is not directly synced to the Dropbox account? It would probably work but I'm not sure if it's really economical for sufficiently large volumes of data.
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Jun 4, 2019 21:23
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