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Happy World Backup Day
An anonymous reader writes "Easter isn't the only thing some people are celebrating today. Today is also World Backup Day. What steps have you taken to be able to resurrect your data, instead of having it go to eternal oblivion?"
I've committed every one and zero to memory.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
World Restore Day?
Wait a sec. I should think it would be "Restore" day. At least for those of the various Christian persuasions.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
World Backup Day?
Wait, backup...
I always buy hard disks in Pairs and Raid them, each disk has a back up.
I've made sure the phone number for the local data recovery services is taped to the side of the server.
Build a man a fire and you warm him for a day. Set a man on fire and you warm him for the rest of his life.
I use ZFS. 100% safe, right? I'll backup to the cloud when amazon ec2 or equivelant service starts accepting drives for putting online in australia.
And I had to use it last week after my drive died.
Automated incremental backup of the headless servers at home, every two days (and I check the backup logs regularly). The backup disks are cycled every 4 weeks: the existing set goes to an insulated box in the garage (a separate heated building), while the previous disks come in and start with a full backup. Our 4 workstations at home all get backed up to local USB disks, but these are merely for convenience - important files are always kept on the servers, where they belong.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I catalog all of my 1s and 0s in a series of sequentially numbered composition notebooks. College ruled, 100 pages each.
And then I photocopy them for redundancy.
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damn I was forced to write text.
"Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it." - Linus Torvalds, 1996
Circumcision is child abuse.
Like, right now now.
There is a considerable amount of stuff that is trial and error, pure grunt work and research.
All that stuff is valuable, if I were to lose it I'd just headbutt my desk till I have no head any more, or become some Saw-like vigilante.
Screw doing all that stuff again, even if some of it is holding me back and rewriting from scratch would be better overall, the time it would take to do it all again would be murderously time-consuming.
Most of it fits within several GBs, and I have been considering doing loads of flash drive backups rather than use hard drives since they are more brittle and prone to damage.
Using 10 flash drives would be better than the size you can afford with a hard drive if your data is small enough and in this case very important.
Now to just write some scripts to make file-difference checks and only backup what is needed.
USB RAID here I come. Too much effort, going to sleep instead. Night.
My data is all in the clouds, with Jesus!
So...I'll shoot:
What is the best online backup service? It doesn't have to be the cheapest (but it helps) - I have used Crashplan and tested Livedrive - they both offer unlimited option and a hassle-free client which works at least quite good, but as Crashplan had a price-hike I'm looking for something else, or is there maybe even superior service I should look into (I'm thinking a scenario where my main OS hard drive just quits with no warning, are there simple online solutions to fully restore you from disaster - I understand this is quite a difficult problem but hey, I'm allowed to ask?)
Why would I want a backup? It's better to just purge and start fresh every year.
Anything you don't remember to reinstall, you never needed.
Do the same thing with your possessions.
I put all my data in a cave and sealed the entrance with a big rock -- but three days later it was all gone.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Time machine requires about zero maintenance and will help me recover quickly if my main hard drive dies. Of course, if a fire or theft results in the simultaneous loss of the backup drive as well, I'm out of luck. So for data that's worth spending a little extra time securing, checking it in to an SVN server works for me.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The First Three Rules of Computing
1 - Backup
2 - Backup
3 - See Rules 1 & 2
Of course, I have no idea how to backup a world. What kind of media would you use, cosmic string recorders?
For values of "cheap" that make me wonder if I really care about my vacation photos that much.
I believe that when when my hard drive dies, on the third day it will live again in fulfillment of scripture.
I recently bought a 3TB drive and filled up my case entirely. I took out my old 750 and 640GB drives and got an Orico 2 Bay Drive dock. One will consist of an encrypted volume filled with all my non-video media backups and virtual machine disk images, and the other will contain my system image via windows backup. I'll probably update the backups ever month or so. Plus I can pull the drives out of this thing and store them in a cool dry place in static bags in case my computer gets struck by lightning.
I've committed one and zero to memory.
I'll be able to regenerate all the data using just those two numbers.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
That is all.
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
I use crashplan's client and all my pcs backup to my home server. All my photos get backed up to a second disk that I keep off site. Their software works pretty flawlessly. I was going to use their cloud service but photo and video data would take months to seed.
You guys are just a bunch of paranoid sons of b ~ '[ &z ( j ` NO CARRIER
Table-ized A.I.
I managed to go 16 years in the IT world, first as a sys admin and now up through an awesome mid-level management position, without any serious data management scares. (And by 'awesome', I mean I work for demoralizing leadership and I've hit a glass ceiling which will force me to go find another company to work for if I want any shot at career advancement.) I've always made sure there's many, many layers of redundancy and good processes in place.
That was until three weeks ago.
We use Microsoft DFS to sync data between two sites. Because of some other things going on, we had to turn DFS off for 3 weeks. We thought we had everyone transitioned to using the "master" file repository, the one that gets backed up every night, etc, etc. The day we turned on DFS back on, all hell broke loose.
Oh - and this is fairly important stuff: 10 years worth of CAD, design, and legal paperwork. It's a few terabytes worth. For our medium-size company, this is basically everything that we hold near and dear.
The first thing that happened is DFS completely puked and completely trashed BOTH filesystems. Fantastic, Microsoft - what a wonderful piece of shit DFS is. Fairly quickly we had to face some data integrity issues. First, we discovered apparently there was a fella at the remote site that was using the copy of files there. Great.. through a fairly manual process we were able to retrieve most of his changes to the dataset. Next, we fairly quickly gave up on trying to fix the DFS - on the advice of Microsoft it seemed to be fairly hopeless.
This is where shit gets real.
Our head sys admin had been troubleshooting an issue with a drive in a RAID'ed NAS backup device had failed. All the other backups had been shifted to other NAS devices, but that backup was so large that it apparently had just been failing. While looking for that, we also discovered the quarterly backup from December had failed (that's the point where I wanted to put on my manager hat and go rip someone a new one, but decided that probably wouldn't be the most productive thing at the moment and could save that little teachable moment asskicking until after we were out of the woods.) Now, the sys admin hadn't been completely foolish, before turning DFS back on he had run some full backups using a different NAS device.
In a f*cking brilliant stroke of disastrous luck, when we went to perform the recovery we discovered that RAID array on the backup NAS device also had corruption.
Now, how bad the corruption was and what exactly that meant remained to be seen. The backups had completed without error, it was the NAS filesystem itself that was throwing the errors. The NAS was still running and our backup software seemed to recognize the backup catalogs on it. Ok, other than what seemed to one potentially corrupt backup, it was seeming like the next best case scenario was a quarterly backup from September, and I was also staring a complete set of disks from 2010 dreading the thought of bringing them back online. Well, with nothing to do other than try a restore, we pressed the button.
That's when I went home mid-morning, chainsmoked four cigarettes on my porch and wondered what would happened if everything went south. In other words, I was contemplating my next job.
'Lo and behold, and restore worked. We had to merge all kinds of things back together to get a complete copy reassembled, then we still had to get DFS working (which took four days of syncing over the WAN.) When it was all said and done, it looked like there were just two files from one set of changes that we couldn't recover.
I think I'll go double check on the backup jobs now.
----- obSig
Amazon Glacier has really changed my backup strategy since this time last year - I now push all my own, generated content (ie: pictures, documents, things I could never get back if I lost everything) up to Glacier using the free Windows client, Fast Glacier. In February I was charged $0.13 by Amazon for storing ~8Gb of data. I tend to push new content up as and when I create it (for example, after I process holiday snaps, or get back from a day out).
Day to day file changes are now handled by Windows 8's File History feature where my changes are pushed to a small NAS (Dlink DNS-320) in my shed (technically off site?) over a Homeplug AV ethernet link. For added security I use the legacy Windows Backup application (still present in Windows 8) to create ~ monthly snapshots of the system which I store on a 320Gb external HDD. This drive is one of two which go back and forth between my parents house each time I got and visit. These disks are encrypted using Microsoft Bitlocker drive encryption.
I should get around to properly encrypting my NAS in the shed, I've been looking at encfs.
LTO5 Drive - 500€ (these are getting cheaper on ebay)
LTO5 tape - 35€ (shipping included, buy more / lower per unit price)
1.5TB per 35€ (23€ per TB)
4TB Drive 200€ (50€ per TB)
but to do backup with HDDs you need two so
4TB == 400€ (100€ per TB)
when hitting the I will need 8TB storage space soon, you do the math and will realize that tapes are better.
vacation photos -> it's part of your identity
RAID 1
No need to do anything. When disaster strikes just wait three days and it simply restores itself. Shortly afterwards the data ascends into The Cloud and becomes available forever and ever. Halleluiah!
finally started digitizing all my home videos (that include work documentation over the years too) to MP4 format. I have at least 100 tapes (8mm and miniDV). I import about 3-4 a day and then let FCP batch process them while I sleep. I can still edit them if I want, but I've already done that with the ones I want. Right now I just want to be able to skim through a 2hr video to find something without sticking the tape into the machine.
I like microcars
damn I was forced to write text.
What happens when you drop that LTO tape?
Good luck with that!
Wait ... so you read /. and you thought a Microsoft tool would avoid disasters? I think rapid reading classes are needed - quickly followed by an LTO drive and some tapes.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
If you're worried about the quality of your backup media (or about your own DEX) you can use QuickPar to add redundancy. It has saved my backups from oblivion on multiple occasions.
I never trusted "cloud" backups but recently I looked into Amazon Glacier - and now my personal backups are stored with "eleven nines" reliability, encrypted, and with price roughly 10 times lower than services such as Dropbox or Google Drive. No affiliation with Amazon... but the question was "how do you do it" so this is my answer.
March 31st so that an April Fools day joke of deleting all your data won't have much of an impact to you.
... we only have a few hours left before they will delete everything !
(grabs 3.5" floppy drive and starts downloading...)
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
When is data recovery day? Have to wait till then for discounts on getting my _________(inject your whatever here, looking for some ideas). http://rawcell.com
I ran a backup to my local external HD yesterday, and today decided to do it again, this time with all my music and moving pictures. I'm also investigating how to use Duplicity on its own to backup my personal material to online places (such as Ubuntu One).
Unfortunately the Deja Dup developers decided that profiles or similar, where you could define different types of backups, where too complicated for the program. I mean, they said it would complicate the program too much for end users.
Ideally I want to backup everything to my external HD. I also want to backup my material (stuff I created) to Ubuntu One etc. It's a lot easier to replace music than it is to replace a six thousand word essay on the future of /. (rocks fall; everyone dies).
Duplicity duplicity.nongnu.org/ is backup done correctly. That is, encrypted, hopefully off-site, and hopefully regularly.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
I use a file server that uses RAID-Z2 to cover disk failures and daily backups to another partition to cover user failures. I snapshot the ZFS file systems and copy the snapshots to removable hard drives which are stored in a safe-deposit box at my bank to cover a site failure. I only offsite quarterly, but it is good enough for a home system. If my house burns down I will have more to worry about than 3 months of lost data.
My physical and virtual machines use the file server for storage of important user data. Local directories are also backed up to the file server (in case I forget to consider something "important"). Windows machines get system state backups to the file server and Linux machines have important paths backed up as well.
Backups are done with Bacula and the Windows system state backups are scheduled tasks so other then the manual process of taking the snapshots and delivering the hard drives the bank, it is all automated.
Had a head crash on my work laptop on Thursday. There was no need for restoring backups in the traditional sense since all company data was on SparkleShare (company internal git repo) and the few personal documents were in Dropbox. I pulled out a new laptop, installed SparkleShare and Dropbox and was good to go.
It is because backups need to be done in advance of the annual Internet spring cleaning.
Every day is backup day if you're doing it right.
Seriously, I would have picked practically anything but a Microsoft branded solution for syncing the data between sites.
I sure don't claim to have all the best answers for I.T. backup, but I'm in charge of redesigning an aging backup system for the office I work in -- and I'm finding you really need to choose your backup tools carefully.
For example, the company purchased Symantec Backup Exec 2012 and wanted me to do the nightly backups with it, and a couple of LTO drives attached to one of the servers. I pretty quickly scrapped that plan, because among other things, I've never really been able to get that arrangement to keep running reliably without some babysitting. The software itself likes to crap out after 1-3 weeks or so of operation, reporting nonsense like "out of memory" errors during backups. Only a server reboot seems to get it working properly again. The tapes are, of course, also a source of some manual involvement. If nobody changes a tape when it's time for the next rotation, a backup gets missed. And as the existing drives were attached via 68-pin SCSI, it makes the hardware nearly obsolete. None of our newer servers had SCSI ports on them -- so I couldn't even move the backup software to a different physical machine if I wanted to.
What's making much more sense for me, so far, is using the Veeam software on a dedicated "backup server" with a lot of disk space in it. Use it to do nightly backups of the virtual machines running on a VMWare box. Then back up shared folders of important data from the file server using that copy of Backup Exec on the backup server, but have it back up to disk instead of tape. Don't try to do anything "fancy" like backups of a server's "system state" -- and the software isn't nearly as likely to bomb out.
THEN, use a freeware rsync utility to keep the backed-up data folders (from both Veeam and Backup Exec) synchronized with storage available at a remote site via a NAS, to serve as a secondary off-site backup.
On the workstation side, your mobile users who save a lot of data to their machine's C: drives and don't xfer it all that regularly to the corporate servers are served well with subscriptions to CrashPlan. After testing several competitors, it was by far the most reliable and fastest at restoring data we needed. Very highly recommended. Just make sure they know to leave their computers on overnight once in a while so all the data gets backed up to the cloud without interruption.
Spideroak for my most essential work related things, home backup for everything else.
I embed the most important data in Bitcoin transactions, and let the geek world mirror the blockchain.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I use rdiff-backup on each of the machines I administer (my machines and those of my wife, at home and at work, plus laptops). rdiff-backup is nice because it saves the current snapshot as a directory that looks exactly like the one being backed up, so restoring stuff is really very trivial.
The backup scripts run daily, backing up to the home directory of the user (a /home/$user/backups directory) so that casual deletion means at most a day of work lost. I rsync all those backup dirs weekly to one of three 1TB drives. They are about 60% full each.
The three of them are rotated arround. One is next to me, one in the basement, and another in a drawer at my office. They get rotated every week.
Seems pretty solid to me. A lot has to happen to leave me with a serious data loss.
Music? Meh. I'll re-rip all my CDs. That's a pain, but I wouldn't technically lose anything.
You'd still lose the multitrack masters if it's music that you wrote and recorded unless you burned a backup of the multitrack masters.
Recently I started using GIT to create weekly backups of all important bits and bytes we have in our household. After commiting the changed files, I push it to a Linux box and a Windows file server (both configured with RAID volumes) with a few clicks on a button. Benefits:
1) GIT is very fast
2) History of the files is preserved
3) With GIT clone and Beyond Compare it is easy the check if all files can be restored correctly
4) It is not much work to encrypt & burn the GIT repos on DVDs, or push to Google Drive or something similar
5) The whole procedure can easily be scripted and run a scheduled basis
I've never had a data disaster, but I still have a somewhat complex setup:
1. Automatic filesystem (ZFS) snapshots every 15 min on my desktop (home, also used for work from home) and RAID to protect against HW failures.
2. Unison (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/) sync between laptop and desktop keeps my home dir in two places (the important bits)
3. Work files are synced to the organisation's system, and that's probably enough
4. Rsync backup to external hard drive every ~3 days, drive is otherwise kept off line
5. Data integrity scan (ZFS scrub) ~every month
6. Rsync with checksums to backup drive to verify integrity, infrequently
7. Off site backup on another HDD, every ~6 months
The snapshots are perhaps the most useful, because they protect against user error. They do not protect against admin errors though, such as running "zfs" commands. I am lacking a bit on the off site backups, and would lose a lot of days of data if there was a fire or a burglary, but I don't produce that much personal data. There should also be an "8. Complete system restore on VM" to see that the backups are good, but as they are only standard Truecrypt volumes with an ext4 filesystem I can inspect them manually and be reasonably sure they are OK.
enough, I backed up my data today, before I knew it was World Backup Day. I have a pair of 40gb hard drives in external USB cases (one black, one silver) that I use for backups. One drive is always off-site, and I exchange them every week.
Thus I have a backup a week (or less) old here, and a backup 2 weeks old at most off-site. I started doing this shortly after some good friends had a fire, and lost everything. Like many folks today, they had about 6 months worth of family pictures that they had not downloaded from their digital camera.
Fortunately for them, the were eventually able to pick apart the melted camera, and its memory card still worked. However, all of their computers were damaged beyond repair, along with all of their backups on CD-R and DVD-R.
This incident shows how devestating a fire can be. The fire was contained in the kitchen at the back of the house, yet between the heat, smoke, and water dammage, their house and almost everything in it was damaged beyond repair or recovery. They tried to recover some clothes and other things from a bedroom at the front of the house, but the smoke smell would not come out of the clothes, and a laptop was internally dammaged by smoke and heat and was non-functional, its hard drive and motherboard un-recoverable. The smoke smell seemed to be sort of baked into everything they tried to recover.
My research indicates that the best long term storage media are hard drives. Computers etc can be replaced. family photos, documents etc... cannot.
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If you don't back up, you'll have to start backing up to restore. If you do backup, you need to test your backups today. For the love of god don't just assume your stuff comes back out ok.
When was it ever down?
I must have missed it.
One local USB, one Network disk placed right by the exit in case I need to abandon ship in a hurry (Bushfire area). Backing up 1.3 terabytes twice consumes backup day. For the rest of the year I do incremental backups. Even if both backups were lost data could be recovered from the cloud.
I've had two data disasters over the years:
1) In the early 90s, I was a teenager using a trusty Apple IIgs to write & edit my first full-length novel, first on 3.5" floppies and then a 20mb Seagate external hard drive. Two or three years into the project, when a summer of 6-8 hour days working on it had the first full rough draft 99% finished and partway into heavy restructuring/editing, I turned the IIgs on only to have it inform me there was no bootable disk. (I later learned that my mother had just vacuumed the drive, including running the brush along the grill.) I tried everything I could think of -- letting the drive warm up longer before turning the computer on, re-seating/moving/replacing the SCSI card -- with no luck. I *had* made floppy backups of the drive, but they turned out to be unreadable. I rewrote most of the missing chapters from memory, but the final two gave me enough trouble that I ultimately gave up.
2) A few years ago, I got back into writing after a decade-long hiatus and eventually decided to try my hand at editing & finishing up the above-mentioned novel. Another year or so of work went by, this time with verified backups made both locally & with an online service that kept multiple versions of each file. I bought an old IBM T20 to work on away from my desk, but it couldn't handle both the online backup and OpenOffice, so I saved my files on a flash drive to transfer to the main system every night or two.
After working intensely all weekend on a couple of chapters, I returned to my office plugged in the flash drive, and was informed that it was unformatted. I refrained from panic, and booted up the old IBM, since I'd set OpenOffice to auto-save every few minutes...only to discover that the autosave directory was empty & the temp folders lacked any relevant files. Using testdisk to investigate made it clear that even though the program had shown the little autosaving bar periodically while I worked, it had never actually done anything, so I was SOL there.
I had dd copy the flash disk to an .img file, which required multiple passes as the drive evidently had some kind of very serious problem, made a copy of the .img, then ran testdisk on the copy to search for the most crucial files. The good news is that it found them; the bad news is that they were corrupt... The worse news, I soon learned, is that a single modern Open Document file is actually multiple files crammed together into a zipfile, and since a tiny problem can render a zipfile unopenable, the contents were lost. Frustrating & severely disheartening for me, but not half as bad as for the people showing up that lost a major work project or doctoral thesis and begged for help only to be smugly told they should've made backups more often.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
I have spent quite some time last year, working on a disaster recovery plan for my company, and one thing I realised was, that of all the important things you have to do to be able to recover after a total wipe-out, back ups are actually the smallest. This is my list of priorities:
1. People: we develop software, and it takes something like a whole year before a new developer is fully on top of their game. The sudden loss of even one of them would seriously hurt our ability to perform. How many could we survive losing in one go?
2. Hardware: it can take anything from a few weeks to several months to replace a server, depending on the specs. Intel x64 based systems are easy to replace, but Itanium, SPARC and POWER less so. No HW = no production; how long could we survive that?
3. Data: restoring data from an off-site backup takes a few days if it isn't urgent, so there isn't all that much of a loss involved, really, as long as you adhere rigidly to a sensible backup scheme.
All of these problems can be addressed, of course, but the point is that one has to be prepared. And backups are likely to be the least part.
The website worldbackupday.com tells you that "World Backup Day and the Globe and Arrow are registered trademarks of 614a ltd. Any use of the trademarks and associated intellectual property must be under a license from 614a ltd.". They intend to make money by charging those who put the logo on their websites. This is not an iniciative of a data administrators community - it is just a company trying to make profit.-Ignacio Agulló
Just had a disk crash which caused 33% of my data stores to go to icing (as is a common phrase over here).
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