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It's World Backup Day
1sockchuck writes "Today is World Backup Day, an occasion to back up your personal data and financial information and check your restores. For those needing motivation — a group that apparently includes 15 percent of data centers — the Slashdot archives bear witness to date disasters at providers small (Ma.gnolia) and large (Microsoft). The World Backup Day initiative grew out of a thread at Reddit, and invites online backup services to observe the occasion by offering discounts."
We can just restore the world from the backup.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
To make sure the tire treads really stick?
It's gonna take me ~weeks~ to duplicate all those punch cards.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
It's also National Cleavage Day. How are you celebrating?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I believe Slashdot itself lost a bunch of stories and posts from around 1998 or so, didn't it?
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URL:
http://www.worldbackupday.net/
Today shouldn't be a day to back up your data, it should be a day to set up automated backups. This is where people need education - even laypeople understand the concept of a backup copy of something, they just don't know about modern tools that can be set up to do it for you automatically.
There's no excuse anymore to not have an automated backup system in place.
I just lost all of my un-backed-up data yesterday, you insensitive clods!
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
...it is "leave the computer off" day in 35 minutes. Let the flood of stupid jokes wash over. Might as well make backups in the meantime. I don't think I will though.
I'll do it tomorrow.
What could go wrong...
...But things like this are typically pushed by company or "association" of companies with vested interests. I mean, let's be honest, who else besides backup software sales shills would benefit from promoting such a thing?
Seriously, NOBODY has altruistic interests in people "backing up their data".
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I had a backup first post but I guess the backup failed. =\
You got the touch!
So that I can install FreeBSD over Debian.
-- Linux user #369862
will it take to back up the World? Well, that's what they said, but they didn't specify which world.
You need to backup your computer files.
Pppppppffffffffffftttttttttt.
I don't need backup because ALL of my data lives at Google Docs.
Yours In Miami,
Kilgore Trout
Yesterday was too productive then, I could have procrastinated backing up the server to an external HDD until today! How can I make up for the loss of slacking now? ...Oh, right, posting comments on the internet.
Yes, we understand these tags always apply: fud, dupe, typo, slashdotted, topic name
Perhaps someone caught up in the spirit of World Backup Day would be kind enough to offer me some advice?
I've got a Mac, but it triple-boots OS X, Windows 7, and Ubuntu 10.04, through a combination of rEFI, grub, and an unhealthy GPT-MBR hybrid partition scheme. Is there any single tool that I can use to back up my whole disk? I'd like to not run individual backup solutions on each operating system, but at the same time, I'd like to backup on a per-file basis, instead of just cloning the whole disk every week or whatever. Is there any single tool out there that will do this, if I were to mount the other two OS partitions in the third?
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
I constantly get calls from folks I don't know like this:
Them: "Hi, you don't know me, but I'm a friend of your milkman's, newspaper boy's, dogsitter . . . they all told me that you are, like real smart with computers. Mine won't start . . . it seems to start, but then the disk screams, and nothing happens.
Me: "Ok, when did you make your last backup?"
Them: "What's a backup?"
Me: "Ok, do you know your administrator password?"
Them: "There is no one here named administrator."
The sad fact, is that I cave in, and go over to help them out.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
...so what is it this time: "your backup didn't really exist after all" ? Best April's Fool evar !
Non-Linux Penguins ?
its called "Friday".
Groundhog day would be a better(or funnier) day for Backup day.
G
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"the Slashdot archives bear witness to date disasters"
Of course the they do. This is slashdot.
Today was hard driver AIDS day here. I've got a date with RESTORING backups for the next few hours, so I go to take a god damned break and what do I see. "It's National Backup Day!" :/ It got me a laugh
1/365th of it just doesn't cut the mustard. Backup carefully and frequently.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. World backup day should be 0 0 * * 0.
is not a coincidence.
And the greatest /. April fools day joke would be to have no April Fools day Jokes. A man can dream
This should be the official theme song for World Backup Day
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjYSERaXEGI
I remember making my first backup... I spent a full weeks worth of lunch money to buy two boxes of 5.25 inch floppy disks and used pkzip's span disk function to backup my entire hard disk... MSDos, Windows 3.1 and all my files...
[The Universe] has gone offline.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Talk-Like-Christopher-Walken-Day-March-31st/191561644207105
Never used one. I've had 5 or 6 computers that could store data and I'll be honest, I don't recall anything on any of them I've felt a need to save or keep. Heck, I don't even want my own memories.
Can I do the opposite of a backup? I'd like to flush delete everything instead.
What backup memo?
I'm a satisfied Crashplan user. I subscribe to the Crashplan Central service (They're calling it Crashplan+ Family Unlimited now), which means I get unlimited (Which appears to be *actually* unlimited, not Comcast-unlimited) backups to their disk farm in a bank vault in Minnesota. I get to back up all my computers - laptops, desktops, and even my personal VPS - all automatically, with staged version retention, and no hassles of running out of disk or other typical backups shenanigans. Totally does what it says.
I picked it because it: has unlimited seats so I can back up all my computers; it works on Linux, OSX, and Windows; and it has several security models, including "manually generate and install encryption keys on a per-machine basis, and make damn sure you back them up somewhere safe because we only have your encrypted data", which I use because it's compatible with my tinfoil hat.
One complaint: On my VPS, it creates some sort of cache that gradually grows to gigs in size. I suspect it's due to indexing the very large number of files that maildirs create. If it runs out of disk, the process starts consuming 100% CPU. Lame. So I have a cron job that shuts it down, blows away the cache, and restarts it periodically.
On the whole: Completely worth 600 pennies a month.
Review 2: My previous solution was BackupPC. I arrived at it after using similar but less refined backups like rsnapshot and dirvish. BackupPC was the best - you just have to throw lots of disk at it, and it does what it promises. If you can do cross-site backups, it's pretty damn good. The downsides were that you have to plan ahead to have enough disk, and the disk IO during backups was unexpectedly high.
I still occasionally make a manual copy of everything and leave it in a safe deposit box. Defense in Depth is a good thing.
Tried to go there, my employer's web filter blocked it as "potentially damaging content."
Linus Torvalds said "Real men don't make backups, they just upload it to some FTP site and let everyone else mirror it"
C|N>K
BACK THE FUCK UP!
I'm spending it sulking over a glass of good Scotch, contemplating that date so many years ago - why did I mention her cleavage just then?...
I bought this house and you know I'm boss
Ain't no h'aint gonna run me off
I never used to back up. I had files scattered about, and anything truly important was either on a hard copy, or on a flash drive or my server or email. Any time I moved to a new computer, the old drive was imaged and copied over to the new one.
In fact, I had a legitimately hard time justifying backups until about 2 years ago until I got both a Mac and a 1TB external drive. Before then, I didn't have enough space to "waste", and I couldn't justify buying more when it was so expensive. And backup software was expensive, or junky. OSX's Time Machine function is just stupid-easy - it's literally as simple as selecting a disk. But the main thing is, it's the first time in my life that it's cheap and easy to just back up everything - for less than $100 you can get a drive that will hold every version of everything on your disk. I have incremental backups back through January 2010. I've never had to use it, but I've helped others - pop the CD in and hook up the drive, and a few hours later you're set. I understand that there's similar tools for Windows and OSX as well, so it's not a fanboi thing. I've also heard great things about Dropbox.
I'm thanking my lucky stars that I didn't need to lose my data to learn my lesson. I know too many people who lost *everything* and were completely screwed. Funny thing is, people don't realize how important backups are until they need them - and by then, it's too late.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
I live in New Zealand, so this article is a day late, you insensite clod!
Now I'll have to wait an entire year to do a backup...
(Glances at Time Machine status)
Done, I guess.
World Backup Day immediately precedes April Fools Day... Is someone going around deleting files in the office again? (That or maybe it's the large number of April 1st-activated virii/worms/whatnot, IE Conficker?)
I've said it once, and I'll say it again: the fundamental theorem of backups is:
Backups != Archives
When you create a backup (as opposed to an archive), do not rely on the backup to hold files you don't currently need. If you do, you'll amass several "backups" that you can't get rid of because they contain files you might need. Instead, put files you're tired of looking at in an *archive*.
This definition of "backup" implies that it is almost completely safe to destroy an old backup to make room for a new one. Or, better yet:
(cd "$HOME"; rsync -av --exclude-from="$HOME/list-of-huge-files" "$HOME" "/media/backup-disk/homedir")
"Today is World Backup Day, an occasion to back up your PORN and check on your significant other (for the first time in six months) [while you wait all day for the backup to finish].
There, fixed it for you.
...why people don't take backups 364 out of 365 days of the year!
A cautionary tale from Ars Technica. It's a long thread, but the "fun" begins about 2/3 of the way through (page 60-something, IIRC).
War is God's way of teaching Americans geography
I had a hard drive failure scare about 10 minutes after reading this article. I'm definitely backing up my data NOW.
Convenient. Day before the pranksters come out. Wonder what cmdrtaco has prepared.
Funny story from work (though not funny at the time). DFS accidentally deleted our IIS configuration, so we tried to restore from backups. The backups were there, but a firewall was misconfigured between the web server and the backup server. It allowed the backup server to take backups, but not send traffic the other way to restore backups. That ended up being a pretty frantic moment as we raced around trying to get some sneakernet going to get the config file back.
So even if you see the backups out on your server, do yourself a favor and do a test restore, just in case! Always better to find out your network is a one way street before the crisis!
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
World backup day should have been scheduled before Mecury went retrograde on March 30!
While everyone is concerned about their next iPad, no one seemed to notice that Japan is one of the only manufacturers of data tapes. Well, almost no one.
I was going to say, organizers of World Backup Day should move their date with it so close to April 1. But, I convinced myself it wasn't so bad ... since you could say a lot of viruses will wake up on April Fools. To counter that, most viruses you have to actually worry about today have money behind it .. so aren't pranks and the controllers probably don't release wake up dates. That, and backing up for reasons besides viruses (you know, like installing Grub 2 :) )
Atlas Shrugged : Thematic Story
Aprils 1st is the perfect day for World Backup Day, since nearly all backup solutions are something of a joke.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Even if you don't set its tasks to run automatically, I've found DirSync Pro to be a very useful GUI tool for streamlining the process of copying/syncing stuff between local drives. (Local backups do serve some purpose, and you can of course use it with portable drives if you want.)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
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