BACKUPS !!!

[Richard Gaskin]

Sorry you had to experience that.  A sobering reminder for all of us.

I had a similar issue many years ago, and since then storage prices have 
dropped, along with the price of cloud services, so now I'm almost 
obsessive about having not only multiple redundant backups, but of 
different kinds.

I have 6 portable USB drives in rotation for daily backups, in addition 
to having key work files sync'd across three machines, one of which also 
maintains a Time Machine backup, and my main rig syncs throughout the 
day to an off-site cloud backup using Nextcloud.

The local backups are run with bash using rsync at the end of each day, 
and the others (Time Machine and Nextcloud) are automatically updated 
throughout the day by design.

Sure, redundant as hell.  But it took very little time to set up, at a 
low cost, and it lets me sleep at night.

All backup systems will fail sooner or later.  All cloud services will 
fail.  Most geographic regions are prone to at least one type of natural 
disaster or another.  And all the while we face security risks which 
require us to be able to re-deploy from backups quickly.

By using multiple backups of different types, I've been able to mitigate 
just about any anticipatable risk.

Like you, I don't want to live through a large data loss ever again. 
And like most folks, I didn't get really serious about redundant backups 
until I'd experienced loss.  Let's hope others can learn without the pain.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems


Ralph DiMola wrote:
> Just a reminder... On Win 10 my 2 TB Raid 1 array using 1.3 TBs containing
> all my data, 3 dev VMs and all my source code was corrupted. It took a very
> annoying day to replace HW(controller) and recover data/VMs from my backups.
> All is back with NO data loss.
> 
> As it has been said here before "Raid is not a substitute for backups". I
> have multiple copies with at least 1 off-line(crypto locker/power surge) and
> 1 off-site(fire/theft). I don't use any cloud backups. Why? MySpace lost 12
> years of user data last year. Although cloud backup reliability is high it's
> not high enough for me to bet my business on not to mention how long it
> would take to download 1.3 TBs. Although all my Mac data is an SMB to the
> Win Raid I still use Time Machine on the Mac so I don't need to re-install
> components needed development.
> 
> Stay vigilant my friends.