Wonky

[lsanderson]

Wonky C drive this morning. Running scan. No fun.

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Yipes, time for me to take the next step and actually *finish* the backup scheme I've been working on for over a year. All the money's been spent, all the hardware is here, just need to get it doing something useful.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

So?

B

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Yeah. The wrong time is after the C drive goes wonky.

Just the other day, all the discussion archives on the Wine Therapy board were deleted by a malicious attacker. There are no backups.

The loss of data -- tasting notes, discussions -- is enormous.

B

It's all better...

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

Although the scan took a loong time...

I'm...

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

In the process of setting up a system. Although important stuff is mostly backed up.

Re: It's all better...

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Backup everything. Put it on a drive, and store it elsewhere. Encrypt it, so you don't care who has physical posession of the disk.

B

Re: I'm...

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've got cd/dvd archives of the photos, and the ebooks, and the software mostly, including off-site copies, I've had that all along. It's just that it requires manual intervention, and I'm often weeks and occasionally months behind.

I'm now keeping my files on a server with mirroring (using ZFS). I've also got provisions to back up my laptop, and Pamela's, and Lydy's, onto the server. Daily snapshots are made on that (ZFS facility, they live on the same physical disk, no space is taken until something changes).

What I'm implementing today (first complete run going this instant) is a procedure to backup from the server disk to external drives; I've got a pair of them (named "wrack" and "ruin"). I'll alternate which one is left plugged in overnight, and a script will run a backup. I'll unplug it in the morning. (If both are left plugged in, the script has a preference which it uses, so it would still alternate, but if they're both plugged in they're both subject to attack by malicious people/software, subject to really stupid moves on my part ("rm -rf /"), etc.)

Encryption would be easy, ZFS supports it, but I'm not doing that yet. Key management becomes, to my mind, an issue. How likely is it that I could remember the password I used if I lost a backup drive for a decade, and was lucky enough that it still worked when I found it? Compared to the danger other people getting at these files pose to me, that seems too big a risk. For a laptop I took with me constantly I'd probably make another choice; for one thing, using it constantly, I'm much less likely to forget the password; that's *current* data not archival data.

When this is fully running, I'll be the best backed up I've been in 12 years, roughly -- then I was running a tape each night. But the tape drive died, and tape was losing at that point, so a drive big enough for the future would have cost a fortune, and there were these cheap CD-Rs available. And now disks are terrifically huge compared to DVDs even. So this new scheme is the right scheme for me for the moment. It's easily extended to a third external drive, in which case I could cycle one of them off-site regularly.

Re: It's all better...

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

I've got a few backups, but I'm running a new one.