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by dspillett 1559 days ago
> to have backups

With the usual additional notes: unless you include an off-site, an off-line (or at least soft-offline) backup, and your backups get tested regularly enough, you don't have a backup system, you have aspirations & hopes!

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For your valuable information anyway. For most individuals the core “it would really inconvenience my life if I lost it” data is surprisingly small¹, and the next layer (“losing it would really annoy me”) is only a few tens of Gb². For personal use everything else in the grand scheme of things can be reacquired or won't be massively missed, things are a bit different for businesses of course.

[1] password store, financial details & other officialdom, code & docs for personal projects that might come to something else [2] meaningful digital photos & such
2 comments
jacquesm 1559 days ago
"With the usual additional notes: unless you include an off-site, an off-line (or at least soft-offline) backup, and your backups get tested regularly enough, you don't have a backup system, you have aspirations & hopes!"

This should be posted in every place where people are involved with IT operations.

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Ensorceled 1559 days ago
It gets posted on HN EVERY SINGLE TIME. Usually the words "have backups" triggers multiple lectures on offsite backups and testing and multiple factors and ...
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dspillett 1559 days ago
I'll stop repeating myself when the world gets the damned hint!

(or stops complaining when something is lost because they didn't)

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elesiuta 1559 days ago
Even if/when the world does get the hint, there will still be https://xkcd.com/1053/ (although most people probably won't find this as exciting)
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formerly_proven 1559 days ago
Don't forget to not roll your own crypto!!!
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Ygg2 1559 days ago
> your backups get tested regularly enough

And you test the tests and so forth.

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dspillett 1559 days ago
It is tests and verifications all the way down!

No matter how careful you are adding automated tests and test to verify those tests have run OK, and making them fail safe (fail with a warning in this case) where possible, it will always soon get to a point that there needs to be a manual “have we seen the everything is OK message recently?” or similar is by far more efficient than adding another tests to send a warning when the last layer of tests has failed.

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