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The amount of times we define a DRP procedure, testing times and so on, just to be told “it’s not THAT important” is staggering to say the least.
At that point I figure backups are the least of my worries. These people like to live on the EDGE
my backup is once in a while manually borging my files onto this chonk, but i have plans to improve on that
I have 8 of these chonks in a raid array. Am I backed up yet?
(No)
Experienced that recently. Every part of the backup was fine, except for the one with all the 2fa codes. Fun times.
Ooooooooooooooof
That stings
Testing restore time is a key part of being a miracle worker. That way you can tell them it’ll take three times as long.
Need to factor in the buffer time
I like to annoy my IT friends by saying my backup strategy is chucking what little important data I have in my free Dropbox account.
It’s not even that important; I don’t care!
If you want to annoy them, tell them you just take snapshots as your backup strategy.
I mean sure you could be sunc’ing your snapshots elsewhere as a real backup strategy but you don’t need to tell them that.
Why does that annoy them? That’s an off-site backup.
For one it’s not a full, real backup strategy. That’s supposed to include multiple tiers.
Also it’s instantly synced, so if I bonk my stuff locally, it could be bonked over there and history might not be able to save me depending on the situation.
And I guess if Dropbox dies my data dies.
Some people take their data seriously enough to worry about that kind of stuff. I don’t.
Heard a lot of horror stories of sites promising a free tier, then making the free tier a lower storage space and locking accounts that go over after a while.
Dropbox is not the best, but if you manage backups properly by storing in more than one space, then its fine.
least it’s better than using chess
Also: don’t wait until you got the perfect setup. A bad/incomplete backup is better than no backup.
THIS! RIGHT HERE!
When I was young and naive about digital things, I had NO BACKUP
One day I got a new laptop. Yay me. Transfer all the data from my old hard drive using some jank-ass local network setup because young and dumb about tech still.
Six months go by, and my new laptop shit itself. Still no idea what happened, but it BSODd and a factory reset got it working again.
I still had my old laptop, so after about a week of searching on forums and reading everything I could find about how to build a pc, how laptop internals compare, data transfers, and literally anything I could so I could pull the old hard drive out without damaging anything and get at least some of my data without issue…
I lost 6 months of new stuff on a much more capable laptop, but it’s better than losing EVERYTHING.
It INFURIATES me how many companies will spend money on backups, but not ever test that their backups restore or allow for continued functionality afterwards.
At one company, I banged this drum for years, and one day we had a situation where someone “accidentally” deleted all the media from a client website. I had to dig through several backups and rebuild from beta, which annoyed me endlessly, but I dropped the “I fucking told you so” several times, and hinted that our “restore scripts weren’t working as intended” to the client. It took me a full day to do what should have taken maybe 1-2 hours at most…
“Son, the time has finally come. Today I’m going to teach you TNO (Trust No One) security.”
my two-year-old stares blankly at me
They’ll be ready to learn about Cryptography, Chains Of Trust and Two Channel Authentication by the age of 3!
I lost a devastating bunch of data when I was very young. Lots of it irreplaceable. Since then I’ve always tried to have a redundant backup strategy
Alright. I have a confession to make…I actually DID make sure my eldest son heard ALL of these things… (And more, but wow…the WHOLE list…)
#proudNerdDadMoment
I allways say “an untested backup does not exist”
But is #7 true if they don’t have a backup?
But RAID is backup if it’s backup…
RAID in a secondary machine is a backup, but that’s because it’s a secondary machine, not because it’s RAID.
Fair enough.
My parents didn’t tell me :'(
Well, your internet IT moms and dads are here to fill that gap!
My dad spent too much time teaching “life lessons” like “brush your teeth” or “eat your vegetables” to get into even the fundamentals of filesystems. The nerve of some people.
