| It's so easy to think you have backups when you don't. I have the following setup: my main machine is Windows and my photos are on a local NTFS drive, that is backed up (mirrored) on a Netgear NAS via rsync; I rotate the backup drives on a weekly basis. Every time the backup job runs it sends an email to tell me how it went. The email is sent via gmail. This used to work well but at some point (a year ago maybe?) gmail decided this was "unsecure" and stopped forwarding the emails. Instead it sent a notice that "somebody tried to send an email and we blocked it". I couldn't be bothered to fix it and accepted the gmail warning notice in lieu of the actual Netgear backup report. Then eventually I upgraded the email notification system... only to find out that the backups were failing systematically. Luckily nothing was lost as the main drive was fine; I was able to fix the problem and do the backups correctly. But of course it could easily have gone a different way: the main drive could have failed and with empty mirrors there would have been no solution, and I would have had only myself to blame. It is so easy to tell oneself that everything is a-okay when it really isn't. |