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by TicklishTiger 1734 days ago
I would not trust this.

What I would trust:

A backup medium (SSD or whatever) which only allows writes to empty space. Unless a switch is manually switched from "write" to "update".

In "write" mode, it would only allow writing to empty space.

In "update" mode, it would allow writing everywhere.

I would leave it in "write" mode most of the time. For me, a typical SSD has enough space for years of incremental backups. If I should ever want to delete old backups, I would set it to "update" mode to do that and then set it back to "write" mode.

4 comments

> A backup medium (SSD or whatever) which only allows writes to empty space. Unless a switch is manually switched from "write" to "update".

Why is your backup medium not encrypted?

> Why is your backup medium not encrypted?

If you lose the key, you lose the backup.

Is this also true for random OS churn etc? Basically when using the SSD as a “persistent cache”
You could probably get a tape to work like this if you can prevent rewinding.
i.e. a log structured file system.
Specifically a WORM. Like Plan 9 had with Fossil and Venti or as in Foundation https://swtch.com/~rsc/papers/fndn/