When disaster strikes... - Page 2

pdurrant · 01-06-2025, 03:10 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sydmalicious

Do you have any nightmarish scenarios you've had to deal with, overcome, or recover from?

I've only had one major disaster, now many years in the past.

Back in the days when hard disk were very expensive, I was upgrading to a bigger hard disk. I copied all my data from the old hard disk to the new hard disk, and it all looked fine. And then, for reasons I can no longer remember, I wiped the first hard disk.

It was only then I found out that Mac OS (at that time) didn't do verification on hard disk to hard disk copies, and there was some problem with the SCSI connectors/termination such that (roughly) one byte in every thousand was now zero....

I could, of course, just reinstall the system software and all the applications. But my email database, and all my source code now had random NUL bytes scattered through it.

I was lucky that the corruption was to NUL bytes, and not to random bytes, as that meant that the corruption was obvious, and could be relatively easily found and patched. But for some years I did find occasional old emails that needed fixing to remove the NUL byte that terminated them prematurely.

Quoth · 01-06-2025, 06:56 AM

I saw this on a Mastodon instance
There is a nice Jazz version of the Beatles' Yesterday too.

Quote:

Hraban (fiëé visuëlle)
@fiee@literatur.social
YESTERDAY

Yesterday,
All those backups seemed a waste of pay.
Now my database has gone away.
Oh I believe in yesterday.

Suddenly,
There's not half the files there used to be,
And there's a milestone
hanging over me
The system crashed so suddenly.

I pushed something wrong
What it was I could not say.

Now all my data's gone
and I long for yesterday-ay-ay-ay.

Yesterday,
The need for back-ups seemed so far away.
I knew my data was all here to stay,
Now I believe in yesterday.

Renate · 01-06-2025, 07:20 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Quoth

I pushed something wrong
What it was I could not say

BT/DT

Sirtel · 01-06-2025, 11:14 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Quoth

I saw this on a Mastodon instance
There is a nice Jazz version of the Beatles' Yesterday too.

Very, very good!

haertig · 01-06-2025, 02:09 PM

This thread re-activated my thinking about my own remote backup needs. Some needs had been ignored, put off, and not addressed as they should have been.

I run Linux, and that can be a problem with some cloud storage providers. They don't make a Linux client. I found a good solution by the name of "rclone". It has been around forever, highly respected, I had heard of it - but had forgotten it.

Yesterday I installed it and did some testing with it. I'm impressed enough to start using it to do my uploading/downloading. Encryption, I will probably use my standards - Veracrypt, Cryptomater, and KeePassXC. rclone does have encryption built in as well, but I do not know enough about that currently to (1) trust it, and (2) know if it is functionally what I want. I'll keep investigating it. As far as what provider to use for storage, I'm going to be using Google Drive. They give you a generous amount of free storage, and this is what several in my family already use. Google is one of the well known "spies" of the internet, so I never would put anything up there unless I had encrypted it personally, on my client end, not using any Google supplied software. This I can do. So I'll start out with storing some data up there. I don't have to worry about using their sync client since I'll be using rclone.

I started looking at what I might want to backup to the cloud. I have good backups here, but if a bomb were to drop on my house and obliterate everything inside, my existing remote backups would not cover things completely. They're on the patchy side at present. There are two classes of data that I want to backup. Class 1 is the frequently changing stuff, and stuff thta is accessed often. This is minimal in size relatively speaking. Then there's the massive stuff - photos, videos, ebooks, music. These eat up a lot of disk space. But the good thing is, they are typically "write once, update almost never, read infrequently, and not urgently". So it makes sense to me to NOT back these up to the cloud and pay for all the storage that would be required. These could safely be written to external hard drives, SSD's, SD cards, thumbdrives, etc. and stored in my Safe Deposit Box. Since this is basically "write once, keep forever" stuff I don't need to worry about routinely retrieving it from the Safe Deposit Box and updating it. I just add to it as I build up more of this type of media, and drive it over the the Safe Deposit Box as needed. I used to remotely back this "write once" stuff up over the internet (to my mom's place, not a cloud provider) so I didn't have to pay for the storage. But really, that was slinging a lot of content over the internet that really didn't require that. Now mom is gone and I don't have that option any more, unless I pair up with someone else as I mentioned in a previous post.

Given that the vast majority of data loss is either user error or a local hardware issue, my existing backups to separate servers (that are inside my house) is where I'll continue to retrieve most of my backups from. Those are fast, efficient, automatic, and already set up (for many years already). It is only the rare "the whole house burned down" scenario where I'll have to hit the remote backups to restore things. And in all honesty, I think it will be much easier, faster, and more secure to make the five minute drive over to my Safe Deposit Box and grab a handful of media than it will be to download terrabytes of data from some cloud provider over the internet. Safe Deposit Box storage is cheaper than cloud storage, and you can store other physical things in a securely locked box that you can't store in the cloud.

Anyway, this is my current line of re-thinking my needs that this thread prompted me to do. Subject to change as I research and think on it more.

DiapDealer · 01-06-2025, 03:19 PM

I handle the situation by ruthlessly deleting anything and everything that I don't need (and I've found I don't actually need much).

The things that I consider vital (not private, mind you, "private" rarely enters into my personal algorithm for keeping something) will easily fit on thumb-drives. So I have many that I rotate, update, and physically relocate often.

I've lost enough data over the years to realize that it's never been as tragic as I feared it would be. I'm not interested in exchanging the curation of physical troves of important "stuff" for electronic ones. I've mostly eliminated both. Less stress.

Sirtel · 01-06-2025, 03:53 PM

For me, curating digital stuff is no stress; I enjoy it.

DiapDealer · 01-06-2025, 04:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sirtel

For me, curating digital stuff is no stress; I enjoy it.

You'd have to enjoy it in order to spend any time doing it, in my opinion.

haertig · 01-06-2025, 07:22 PM

You both have great points. Personally, I like curating digital stuff too. But I know I don't need to do that. Many things I don't need to do. That explains why doing laundry goes like this for me:

Washing: 45 minutes
Drying: 45 minutes
Folding and Putting Away: 5 to 7 business days

I've found that I just don't need to do that last thing. I can live out of the laundry basket I used to haul the washed clothes upstairs with.

It all boils down to what I want to do with my time, not what I need to do. Usually, I don't want to do the things I need to do, and don't need to do the things I want to do.

Sirtel · 01-06-2025, 07:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by haertig

You both have great points. Personally, I like curating digital stuff too. But I know I don't need to do that. Many things I don't need to do. That explains why doing laundry goes like this for me:

Washing: 45 minutes
Drying: 45 minutes
Folding and Putting Away: 5 to 7 business days

LOL, it's exactly the same for me.

Quote:

Usually, I don't want to do the things I need to do, and don't need to do the things I want to do.

I think that's true for most people.

DiapDealer · 01-06-2025, 08:18 PM

I'm a folder and putter-awayer right after everything comes out of the dryer. So that explains a lot.

It may be true that most people fall into the "Usually, I don't want to do the things I need to do, and don't need to do the things I want to do" group. But I'd have to see a lot more proof to be convinced of it. With me and a lot of the people I relate to, there's a ton of overlap. Perhaps both sides are guilty of assuming they're in the majority.

Sirtel · 01-06-2025, 08:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

It may be true that most people fall into the "Usually, I don't want to do the things I need to do, and don't need to do the things I want to do" group. But I'd have to see a lot more proof to be convinced of it. With me and a lot of the people I relate to, there's a ton of overlap.

I know some such people as well. Heck, my parents were like that. This kind of thinking and worldview are quite alien to me.

(Yes, I loved my parents and got on pretty well with them. But we never really understood one another.)

Karellen · 01-06-2025, 09:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sirtel

For me, curating digital stuff is no stress; I enjoy it.

Yep, me too. My video collection is immaculate. Then when that was pretty close to perfection, I moved onto my books...

Like @Haertig I have divided my data into two categories -
1. Important data, or data that if lost would be difficult and time-consuming to replace
2. Not really important, or I have (with media) original dvds/blurays to restore from

Important stuff is mirrored onto a local drive, and also backed up to an offsite HDD at irregular intervals, about once a month.

Been working quite well for the last 10+ years. I have had two HDD failures, both containing the "important" data. No stress. New HDD and then copied back the mirrored backup.

Start of Dec I built myself a TrueNAS server as I had run out of storage on my mish-mash of mixed spinning disk drives. While not a true backup, it does offer some redundancy for the second category.

Sirtel · 01-06-2025, 09:33 PM

Everything I back up is (more or less) important to me. I don't back up unimportant stuff; it just lives on my current computer, tablet or phone until I upgrade. I don't mirror or clone my drives when getting a new device - I just sync all the important stuff from Dropbox to a new computer and leave the unimportant stuff behind.

That said, I change and update lots of my stuff constantly, so an offsite physical storage wouldn't suit me.

Mel · 01-07-2025, 09:11 AM

My worst backup disaster was restoring my calibre library after loss of a laptop and finding that the backup drive I had been using has been designed to only backup major file types. So the library initially looked fine, because the cover graphics has been saved along with the few pdfs. But the majority were empty. Luckily the previous backup drive was still on the shelf with 75% of the library so only the newer items had to be tracked down. I still curse whoever designed that thing when I think about it.

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01-06-2025, 02:09 PM	#20
haertig Wizard Posts: 1,869 Karma: 31522252 Join Date: Sep 2017 Device: PW3, Fire HD8 Gen7, Moto G7, Sansa Clip v2, Ruizu X26	This thread re-activated my thinking about my own remote backup needs. Some needs had been ignored, put off, and not addressed as they should have been. I run Linux, and that can be a problem with some cloud storage providers. They don't make a Linux client. I found a good solution by the name of "rclone". It has been around forever, highly respected, I had heard of it - but had forgotten it. Yesterday I installed it and did some testing with it. I'm impressed enough to start using it to do my uploading/downloading. Encryption, I will probably use my standards - Veracrypt, Cryptomater, and KeePassXC. rclone does have encryption built in as well, but I do not know enough about that currently to (1) trust it, and (2) know if it is functionally what I want. I'll keep investigating it. As far as what provider to use for storage, I'm going to be using Google Drive. They give you a generous amount of free storage, and this is what several in my family already use. Google is one of the well known "spies" of the internet, so I never would put anything up there unless I had encrypted it personally, on my client end, not using any Google supplied software. This I can do. So I'll start out with storing some data up there. I don't have to worry about using their sync client since I'll be using rclone. I started looking at what I might want to backup to the cloud. I have good backups here, but if a bomb were to drop on my house and obliterate everything inside, my existing remote backups would not cover things completely. They're on the patchy side at present. There are two classes of data that I want to backup. Class 1 is the frequently changing stuff, and stuff thta is accessed often. This is minimal in size relatively speaking. Then there's the massive stuff - photos, videos, ebooks, music. These eat up a lot of disk space. But the good thing is, they are typically "write once, update almost never, read infrequently, and not urgently". So it makes sense to me to NOT back these up to the cloud and pay for all the storage that would be required. These could safely be written to external hard drives, SSD's, SD cards, thumbdrives, etc. and stored in my Safe Deposit Box. Since this is basically "write once, keep forever" stuff I don't need to worry about routinely retrieving it from the Safe Deposit Box and updating it. I just add to it as I build up more of this type of media, and drive it over the the Safe Deposit Box as needed. I used to remotely back this "write once" stuff up over the internet (to my mom's place, not a cloud provider) so I didn't have to pay for the storage. But really, that was slinging a lot of content over the internet that really didn't require that. Now mom is gone and I don't have that option any more, unless I pair up with someone else as I mentioned in a previous post. Given that the vast majority of data loss is either user error or a local hardware issue, my existing backups to separate servers (that are inside my house) is where I'll continue to retrieve most of my backups from. Those are fast, efficient, automatic, and already set up (for many years already). It is only the rare "the whole house burned down" scenario where I'll have to hit the remote backups to restore things. And in all honesty, I think it will be much easier, faster, and more secure to make the five minute drive over to my Safe Deposit Box and grab a handful of media than it will be to download terrabytes of data from some cloud provider over the internet. Safe Deposit Box storage is cheaper than cloud storage, and you can store other physical things in a securely locked box that you can't store in the cloud. Anyway, this is my current line of re-thinking my needs that this thread prompted me to do. Subject to change as I research and think on it more.

01-06-2025, 03:19 PM	#21
DiapDealer Grand Sorcerer Posts: 28,272 Karma: 203719142 Join Date: Jan 2010 Device: Nexus 7, Kindle Fire HD	I handle the situation by ruthlessly deleting anything and everything that I don't need (and I've found I don't actually need much). The things that I consider vital (not private, mind you, "private" rarely enters into my personal algorithm for keeping something) will easily fit on thumb-drives. So I have many that I rotate, update, and physically relocate often. I've lost enough data over the years to realize that it's never been as tragic as I feared it would be. I'm not interested in exchanging the curation of physical troves of important "stuff" for electronic ones. I've mostly eliminated both. Less stress.

01-06-2025, 03:53 PM	#22
Sirtel Grand Sorcerer Posts: 12,792 Karma: 236462758 Join Date: Jan 2014 Location: Estonia Device: Kobo Sage & Libra 2	For me, curating digital stuff is no stress; I enjoy it.

01-06-2025, 07:22 PM	#24
haertig Wizard Posts: 1,869 Karma: 31522252 Join Date: Sep 2017 Device: PW3, Fire HD8 Gen7, Moto G7, Sansa Clip v2, Ruizu X26	You both have great points. Personally, I like curating digital stuff too. But I know I don't need to do that. Many things I don't need to do. That explains why doing laundry goes like this for me: Washing: 45 minutes Drying: 45 minutes Folding and Putting Away: 5 to 7 business days I've found that I just don't need to do that last thing. I can live out of the laundry basket I used to haul the washed clothes upstairs with. It all boils down to what I want to do with my time, not what I need to do. Usually, I don't want to do the things I need to do, and don't need to do the things I want to do.

01-06-2025, 08:18 PM	#26
DiapDealer Grand Sorcerer Posts: 28,272 Karma: 203719142 Join Date: Jan 2010 Device: Nexus 7, Kindle Fire HD	I'm a folder and putter-awayer right after everything comes out of the dryer. So that explains a lot. It may be true that most people fall into the "Usually, I don't want to do the things I need to do, and don't need to do the things I want to do" group. But I'd have to see a lot more proof to be convinced of it. With me and a lot of the people I relate to, there's a ton of overlap. Perhaps both sides are guilty of assuming they're in the majority.

01-06-2025, 09:33 PM	#29
Sirtel Grand Sorcerer Posts: 12,792 Karma: 236462758 Join Date: Jan 2014 Location: Estonia Device: Kobo Sage & Libra 2	Everything I back up is (more or less) important to me. I don't back up unimportant stuff; it just lives on my current computer, tablet or phone until I upgrade. I don't mirror or clone my drives when getting a new device - I just sync all the important stuff from Dropbox to a new computer and leave the unimportant stuff behind. That said, I change and update lots of my stuff constantly, so an offsite physical storage wouldn't suit me.

01-07-2025, 09:11 AM	#30
Mel Connoisseur Posts: 57 Karma: 6570782 Join Date: Aug 2007 Device: Android tablet	My worst backup disaster was restoring my calibre library after loss of a laptop and finding that the backup drive I had been using has been designed to only backup major file types. So the library initially looked fine, because the cover graphics has been saved along with the few pdfs. But the majority were empty. Luckily the previous backup drive was still on the shelf with 75% of the library so only the newer items had to be tracked down. I still curse whoever designed that thing when I think about it.

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