make your own backups!
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Keep in mind of course that one should consider carefully what 'backup' actually means. Specifically even though it is seems to be working, is it being verified on a regular basis? So can one actually get to that old data?
jschell wrote:
Keep in mind of course that one should consider carefully what 'backup' actually means.
I've got friends who state in dead earnest that 'I have a backup copy of my photos in the the cloud, so I have cleaned them out of my hard disk'. I have tried to give them a lesson in what 'backup' means. Not all of them are willing to understand.
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Never trust someone else with your stuff.
Ironically, people do that with money all the time. :wtf:
Jeremy Falcon
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I'm still reading that those who need to perform massive backups still prefer tapes. I've always been a skeptic. Isn't everything about a tape backup solution proprietary? If you have a specific type of tape, you have to have the matching drive. The reverse is also true, if you have a specific drive, you can't just use any tape in it. I suppose there might be compatible makes/models (of both drives and tapes), but things are still not as interchangeable as "hard drive A vs hard drive B". And then the software tends to be proprietary, and not every OS can just read any random file from a given tape. If you've done a backup with software XYZ, you have to do software XYZ to do the restore. Imagine finding a bug in the restore portion of the software, and the manufacturer has gone out of business years prior. That would worry me, unless I had an unlimited budget and could purchase all the redundancy I'd need to be comfortable. How many tape drives is that? I have no idea. Imagine having stocked up with 5 spare tapes drives...with a SCSI interface. Obviously big business has different needs than *I* do. I'm perfectly happy doing "xcopy backups" to multiple hard disks. No proprietary software, you can access any file in any folder instantaneously, no matter what OS you mount the drive with (within reason), hardware interfaces will remain standard for years if not decades before being deprecated, you can buy them in various capacities from different manufacturers, and they're relatively cheap. I tend to buy them in sets of 3 - one live, a disconnected backup, and an off-site backup. When I outgrow a set, it becomes more or less a permanent archive of "things as they existed at that point in time". When SATA became the standard, I had plenty of time to migrate the data from IDE drives to SATA drives. Whenever SATA gets replaced, I'll just do the same. The non-starter is when you have massive amounts of data. I try to keep my entire backup set on a single drive, and I currently have a trio of 16TB drives. If my archive suddenly grew to double that, I wouldn't have a "single-drive solution", as 32TB drives are still a long way off. I'd hate to have to maintain a RAID, and multiple backups of it...
You are pointing out something that is very essential. As I said in a different post, I guess there are millions of old backups that are useless, for the reasons you mention. In addition comes what you are not mentioning: Having the right software (that includes the OS) to run the application to interpret your files. But I'd also like to mention that there were standard even in the old days. Open reel 1/2" tape formats followed international standards from the mid 1960s. The standards passed then was essentially to accept the IBM 'proprietary' format as the standard - which a lot of other manufacturers already had done. You certainly could move a tape from one machine to a different one. QIC (Quarter Inch Cassette) tape was standardized in the early 1980s. The good thing is that there are so many QIC standards to choose from :-), but the standards were vendor independent. We are all familiar with memory sticks: The USB standard defines a mass storage virtual drive. SCSI did, too, in 1982. You could plug a disk or a tape station into any SCSI socket; it would identify itself as a disk drive honoring the virtual disk specification, a tape station honoring the virtual tape drive specification, and so on. There were virtual scanners and printers, too, in the specification. So it wasn't all proprietary. If you have an old QIC tape, you must find a physical QIC reader; it can be of any make, as it handles the one format on your tape, which is by an international, vendor-independent standard. There are quite a few of them, all international standards. Make sure that your QIC reader is a SCSI one (most of them were). Then you can plug it into any PC with a SCSI interface, which can be found almost anywhere, right? :-) It can be of any make. Windows, *nix and other OS-es see the same files on the tape. But cross your fingers for that SCSI interface: I was actively in favor of SCSI for a few years: One great standard for everything! It was daisy chained, not a tree, but the chain could have all sorts of devices in it, much like USB. Except that when I had to buy an adapter cable for the eight plug 'standard' for SCSI, and the salesman said I was lucky: There are fourteen different plugs used with SCSI! (this is 25+ years ago; I guess there are more now), then I called a halt. No more SCSI for me. USB was sliding down that same slope: I've got A, A 3.0, B, B 3.0, Mini B, Micro B, Micro B 3.0. I have equipment requiring all of these, then there are some I never used. When C arrived, I said: OK,
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I never trusted online backups. I do not trust them to keep my data safe. Nor to keep them private. Nor to allow me to store arbitrary files. Nor to be able to present my photo album to my grandchildren 50 years from now. Nor to not show them my very personal notes that were meant for noone but myself. I could use an online backup to save an extra backup, in case my primary backup is lost. A lot of files in that extra backup would be encrypted before sending them down in the crypt. I am not currently doing that. Does the online bakcup have an offsite bakcup? (Thanks to fgs1963 for reminding us about offsite copies!) This story seems to suggest that the answer is 'No'. There are a couple other points that are often overlooked: I have some old files backed up on both DC100 and DC300 quarter inch tape cassette. (Actually, I even have some files on 1/2" open reel 7-track tape, but I made that tape mostly to learn how to handle the tape station, not really for bakup purposes). I have files on two different Travan tape cassettes. I have at least one hundred 8" floppies (they were really flopping!). The first digital camera I used saved the photos on 2" floppies - I still got the floppies, but the camera belonged to my workplace, 30+ years ago. I never had my own Travan station; it belonged to my workplace, too. Obviously, I didn't have a 7-track tape station at home. I could have had a DC300 (the format changed name to QIC); they weren't that expensive, but I rather brought my private files to work and saved them to tape there. I guess that if my life depended on it, it would be possible to have the files on QIC tape recovered. It probably would take too much time to save my life. It probably would be terribly expensive. But there were a whole crowd of variants, in track layout, packing density etc., so don't expect just any old QIC station to be able to read my first-generation DC300 tapes (before the QIC standard arrived). The open reel and Travan tapes, and the 2" floppy, are nice computer museum artifacts. Even if my life depended on it, I guess I would have crossed the river before anyone could get hold of a reader for them. I actually have both 5.25" and 3.5" floppy units, but I am about to ditch the PC that can handle them; I haven't booted it for years. Most likely, some of my friends still have 3.5" units, Maybe even 5.25", I wouldn't be sure of that. Then comes the second major problem: I have migrated 'the most important' files from one medium to another. Over 4
Quote:
No modern grandpa or grandma digs up an photo album from their childhood, to show and tell the grandchildren how it was back then.
We do. I even digitized old super 8 films, put them on a web server (Raspberry Pi) and put it on line for them to watch. They said they did. The wife is making copies of photo's and newspaper clipping for my daughter to take to her 30th HS reunion. Alas, born of the 30's, we are string savers. We each vow to go first to avoid having to go through the other's "stuff".
>64 Some days the dragon wins. Suck it up.
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I was not surprised to see this article: Google Drive users angry over losing months of stored data[^] I have non-critical and non-personal (no financial data, etc.) in cloud services including OneDrive, but periodically save backups. I've been told I'm paranoid ... my response is that hardware failure is a "when" not an "if" ... and let's not get into human error ... :laugh:
Having cleaned up after 3 different ransomeware attacks (different clients), I probably have different thoughts about backup. Worst loss: 3 days of email. All backups were air-gapped. There is Backup and there is D.R. Different requirements, IMO.
>64 Some days the dragon wins. Suck it up.
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I've seen some articles suggesting there's no "error" or "failure" here, and it's all by design, as Google has apparently been sending emails for months warning they'd be doing a massive cleanup of unused accounts. On December 1st, to be exact. Coincidence? I wouldn't be surprised if the two events were related. Maybe they've started doing it on a small scale before pulling the trigger, and everybody's now finding out it's including stuff that should NOT be deleted (eg, data that is NOT inactive). IMO: Cloud services claim to sell a solution for the lazy. The reality is that you shouldn't give up on the good old tried and true methods. As per the subject line - make your own backups, because their EULAs sure don't say they're responsible for anything that happens to your data.
They might be related but it's just a snafu, not a conspiracy.
Paul Sanders. If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter - Blaise Pascal. Some of my best work is in the undo buffer.
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I was not surprised to see this article: Google Drive users angry over losing months of stored data[^] I have non-critical and non-personal (no financial data, etc.) in cloud services including OneDrive, but periodically save backups. I've been told I'm paranoid ... my response is that hardware failure is a "when" not an "if" ... and let's not get into human error ... :laugh:
This one's going to run and run, but what I do is: - daily backups to a second, local hard drive - daily backups to OneDrive (I use that because storage there is cheap) I feel on pretty safe ground here, don't reckon I'm going to lose anything. I used to also back up occasionally to an external drive, but I don't do that anymore.
Paul Sanders. If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter - Blaise Pascal. Some of my best work is in the undo buffer.
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I was surprised when my friends and coworkers one by one revealed that they no longer had any player for CD/DVD. I wanted to introduce them to some music or movies I had in my archive, but they couldn't make use of the disk. If I couldn't provide a URL for an online version, they shrugged and started talking about music/movies that are available online. This started at least 5-6 years ago. Today, I don't know of anyone who has bought a PC with an optical reader for five years. One of my friends still have an old PC with one, but he boots up that machine only when he needs to run some old software that doesn't run on W11. In earlier years, visiting friends with a disc in your hand was a social thing. We saw the movie together, or listened to the music. In those cases where I could dig up a URL for a friend, we never saw the movie or enjoyed the music together; he went home and watched / listened alone. In the very best case, he reported some reactions next time we met. Usually not. So if my house burns down, and my computer media is melted, even if I had been keeping off-site optical backup disks, I would not know of anyone who could help me retrieve my files. I would have to go to some commercial and probably expensive service provider to have it done. There is another problem with finalized DVD disks: The Tao of Backup[^], the Second Head: The novice asked the backup master: "How often should I backup my files? It has been a month since my last backup." The master replied: "Just as night follows day, and Autumn follows Summer, so should backups follow work. As you work, so should you backup that work." The novice said: "I work each day". The master replied: "Then you should backup each day". The novice replied: "I agree, but right now I haven't got time to make a backup, as I have too much work to do." Upon hearing this, the master fell silent. Backing up to a finalized optical disc and bring the disc offsite every day, is beyond my working habits. :-) (For those unfamiliar with The Tao of Backup: 26 years old and still 100% true! Read and enjoy it!)
Yep, the days of CD/DVD writers are numbered. My last laptop went even further - no Ethernet port, either! And my most recent PC doesn't even have a knockout in the front panel to install a writer if I wanted to do so.
Will Rogers never met me.
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I was not surprised to see this article: Google Drive users angry over losing months of stored data[^] I have non-critical and non-personal (no financial data, etc.) in cloud services including OneDrive, but periodically save backups. I've been told I'm paranoid ... my response is that hardware failure is a "when" not an "if" ... and let's not get into human error ... :laugh:
My very first boss in the business, this would have been 1978 and the environment was IBM mainframe, gave me a 7 inch magtape and said "every good programmer has a backup". Now it I use thumb drives on Intel/Windows or Linux; I make backups/copies about every other day and at significant milestones. One copy onto the shared network drive, one into my pocket. May be a problem with company policy? everything is password protected and/or encrypted with a key and I don't make a big deal of letting people know I don't trust their network copies.
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They might be related but it's just a snafu, not a conspiracy.
Paul Sanders. If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter - Blaise Pascal. Some of my best work is in the undo buffer.
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I'm still reading that those who need to perform massive backups still prefer tapes. I've always been a skeptic. Isn't everything about a tape backup solution proprietary? If you have a specific type of tape, you have to have the matching drive. The reverse is also true, if you have a specific drive, you can't just use any tape in it. I suppose there might be compatible makes/models (of both drives and tapes), but things are still not as interchangeable as "hard drive A vs hard drive B". And then the software tends to be proprietary, and not every OS can just read any random file from a given tape. If you've done a backup with software XYZ, you have to do software XYZ to do the restore. Imagine finding a bug in the restore portion of the software, and the manufacturer has gone out of business years prior. That would worry me, unless I had an unlimited budget and could purchase all the redundancy I'd need to be comfortable. How many tape drives is that? I have no idea. Imagine having stocked up with 5 spare tapes drives...with a SCSI interface. Obviously big business has different needs than *I* do. I'm perfectly happy doing "xcopy backups" to multiple hard disks. No proprietary software, you can access any file in any folder instantaneously, no matter what OS you mount the drive with (within reason), hardware interfaces will remain standard for years if not decades before being deprecated, you can buy them in various capacities from different manufacturers, and they're relatively cheap. I tend to buy them in sets of 3 - one live, a disconnected backup, and an off-site backup. When I outgrow a set, it becomes more or less a permanent archive of "things as they existed at that point in time". When SATA became the standard, I had plenty of time to migrate the data from IDE drives to SATA drives. Whenever SATA gets replaced, I'll just do the same. The non-starter is when you have massive amounts of data. I try to keep my entire backup set on a single drive, and I currently have a trio of 16TB drives. If my archive suddenly grew to double that, I wouldn't have a "single-drive solution", as 32TB drives are still a long way off. I'd hate to have to maintain a RAID, and multiple backups of it...
dandy72 wrote:
Isn't everything about a tape backup solution proprietary?
Up until about 20 years ago tape was the only solution. So that really wasn't a consideration. Not to mention that automation systems even with tape were very expensive. So that meant a IT guy needed to swap tapes in and out.
dandy72 wrote:
The non-starter is when you have massive amounts of data
There are other potential problems. For example a database with encrypted columns. Where is the key? Or an encrypted file. Where is the key or passphrase for that. Those are not necessarily relevant just to disaster recovery either. If you have 7 years of backups, which is often considered a norm for financial data, and you get a subpoena you will need for legal reasons to show that you tried to recover that data. At one company I considered disaster recovery just not possible. The DBA stated it would take more than a week to restore the database from the back up. But in addition there was no back up for the proprietary machine that ran the database. I figured best case scenario was that it would take 6 weeks to recover if the hardware failed. They originally budgeted an onsite back up machine but that was nixed due to the cost. Nixed by those above operations/development.
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jschell wrote:
Keep in mind of course that one should consider carefully what 'backup' actually means.
I've got friends who state in dead earnest that 'I have a backup copy of my photos in the the cloud, so I have cleaned them out of my hard disk'. I have tried to give them a lesson in what 'backup' means. Not all of them are willing to understand.
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You're right, I attribute this to incompetence rather than malice. But the main point remains...if something's important to you, you can't have the only instance of it existing only on a cloud service.
Absolutely
Paul Sanders. If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter - Blaise Pascal. Some of my best work is in the undo buffer.
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BryanFazekas wrote:
I doubt that this situation is exactly by design, as the accounts affected are not ones that have been dormant for 2+ years
There is an old story from the Computing Center at the University of Copenhagen, around 1970 (so, no URL reference to the event :-)). Clocks with battery backup were not common. After a power failure, the operator had to type in the current date and time of day on the system console. It happened that the operator mistyped the year without discovering that he missed by a decade. Before the mistake was discovered, they had run the cleanup program that deleted all files that hadn't been touched for six months. There is an interesting 'Part 2' to this story: Disk space was terribly expensive in those days, so all large data sets were kept on 1/2" magnetic tape. The cleanup program didn't wipe the tapes. But ... Standard tape formats, used when exchanging data with other installations, contained complete metadata for every file. Even tape was expensive, so Univac (this happed on a Univac 1100 system) had devised a format where only the data blocks were densely packed on the tape, while all metadata was maintained on disk, for fast searching for files. All this metadata was wiped by the cleanup procedure. The 'real data' was still there on tape, but on which tape? Where on that tape? Noone could tell. Our professor, when telling this story, said that a for a few very important projects, the viable tape wheel candidates had been dissected by hand, and the blocks put together, like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Fortunately, in those days, a lot of research didn't depend completely on the computer, it was more like a calculator that you picked up for specific calculations; that was all. Imagine the situation today, if the next pandemic doesn't infect humans, but the virus thrive on silicon and is capable of getting through the shields to eat every logical gate of all digital electronics on earth. I have difficulties finding a single (Western) human activity that could continue completely unaffected if that happened.
trønderen wrote:
but the virus thrive on silicon and is capable of getting through the shields
Shields? Chips have a epoxy package. So silicon is not exposed there. And actually inside is Silicon Dioxide. And Silicon Dioxide is not very reactive. So I doubt a virus could exist by itself that could do that. It would require a medium as well which means no spread. Now plastic might be a better candidate for that scenario. I would not be surprised if there are also limitations even with that scenario. So probably best to just stick with an EMP.
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I never trusted online backups. I do not trust them to keep my data safe. Nor to keep them private. Nor to allow me to store arbitrary files. Nor to be able to present my photo album to my grandchildren 50 years from now. Nor to not show them my very personal notes that were meant for noone but myself. I could use an online backup to save an extra backup, in case my primary backup is lost. A lot of files in that extra backup would be encrypted before sending them down in the crypt. I am not currently doing that. Does the online bakcup have an offsite bakcup? (Thanks to fgs1963 for reminding us about offsite copies!) This story seems to suggest that the answer is 'No'. There are a couple other points that are often overlooked: I have some old files backed up on both DC100 and DC300 quarter inch tape cassette. (Actually, I even have some files on 1/2" open reel 7-track tape, but I made that tape mostly to learn how to handle the tape station, not really for bakup purposes). I have files on two different Travan tape cassettes. I have at least one hundred 8" floppies (they were really flopping!). The first digital camera I used saved the photos on 2" floppies - I still got the floppies, but the camera belonged to my workplace, 30+ years ago. I never had my own Travan station; it belonged to my workplace, too. Obviously, I didn't have a 7-track tape station at home. I could have had a DC300 (the format changed name to QIC); they weren't that expensive, but I rather brought my private files to work and saved them to tape there. I guess that if my life depended on it, it would be possible to have the files on QIC tape recovered. It probably would take too much time to save my life. It probably would be terribly expensive. But there were a whole crowd of variants, in track layout, packing density etc., so don't expect just any old QIC station to be able to read my first-generation DC300 tapes (before the QIC standard arrived). The open reel and Travan tapes, and the 2" floppy, are nice computer museum artifacts. Even if my life depended on it, I guess I would have crossed the river before anyone could get hold of a reader for them. I actually have both 5.25" and 3.5" floppy units, but I am about to ditch the PC that can handle them; I haven't booted it for years. Most likely, some of my friends still have 3.5" units, Maybe even 5.25", I wouldn't be sure of that. Then comes the second major problem: I have migrated 'the most important' files from one medium to another. Over 4
trønderen wrote:
and the kids would find it boring. So it doesn't really matter if the files are lost.
Yep. The fact that one person finds is significant and valuable does not mean that others will. The only difference with digital is that it will give someone the chance to toss it without agonizing over whether they should keep it or not.
trønderen wrote:
Some of my amateur photographer friends
I had an office mate who had 1,800 photos of his 18 month old child. All labeled. All digital fortunately which made getting the count easier of course. (Even worse I can't remember the exact number but it might have been 18,000.) Second child was on the way. There is a well known phenomenon where parents take way more photos of the first child than the children that come after that.
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This one's going to run and run, but what I do is: - daily backups to a second, local hard drive - daily backups to OneDrive (I use that because storage there is cheap) I feel on pretty safe ground here, don't reckon I'm going to lose anything. I used to also back up occasionally to an external drive, but I don't do that anymore.
Paul Sanders. If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter - Blaise Pascal. Some of my best work is in the undo buffer.
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Presumably full rather than overwrites? If just a overwrite then this is susceptible to a ransomware attack. Could still be even so if the older ones are still writable.
OneDrive keeps old versions. 30 days, IIRC
Paul Sanders. If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter - Blaise Pascal. Some of my best work is in the undo buffer.
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trønderen wrote:
but the virus thrive on silicon and is capable of getting through the shields
Shields? Chips have a epoxy package. So silicon is not exposed there. And actually inside is Silicon Dioxide. And Silicon Dioxide is not very reactive. So I doubt a virus could exist by itself that could do that. It would require a medium as well which means no spread. Now plastic might be a better candidate for that scenario. I would not be surprised if there are also limitations even with that scenario. So probably best to just stick with an EMP.
I guess you didn't get my point. If, one way or the other (I'm not going to suggest any alternative to a virus; I guess you would start arguing against that as well) all our digital processors stopped working, can you imagine the effect on our culture? It would be devastating. We have made ourselves, both personally and as a society/culture 100% dependent on digital technology. That is what worries me. Not the probability of some randomly picked, specific threat. It could be something completely different.
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dandy72 wrote:
Isn't everything about a tape backup solution proprietary?
Up until about 20 years ago tape was the only solution. So that really wasn't a consideration. Not to mention that automation systems even with tape were very expensive. So that meant a IT guy needed to swap tapes in and out.
dandy72 wrote:
The non-starter is when you have massive amounts of data
There are other potential problems. For example a database with encrypted columns. Where is the key? Or an encrypted file. Where is the key or passphrase for that. Those are not necessarily relevant just to disaster recovery either. If you have 7 years of backups, which is often considered a norm for financial data, and you get a subpoena you will need for legal reasons to show that you tried to recover that data. At one company I considered disaster recovery just not possible. The DBA stated it would take more than a week to restore the database from the back up. But in addition there was no back up for the proprietary machine that ran the database. I figured best case scenario was that it would take 6 weeks to recover if the hardware failed. They originally budgeted an onsite back up machine but that was nixed due to the cost. Nixed by those above operations/development.
jschell wrote:
Up until about 20 years ago tape was the only solution.
I would raise that to 30 years, if you talk about the only solution. 21 years ago, in 2002, my employer at the time - the National Library of Norway - threw out their tape robot, replacing it with a big wall of RAIDed hard disks. Tape was considered an outdated technology; certainly not 'the only solution'.
So that meant a IT guy needed to swap tapes in and out.
This tape robot, thrown out in 2002, was fully automated. No manual handling of tapes. I am not sure how old the robot was; it had been there a few years when I entered the job. Their policy was to migrate all archived data to new media every 5 to 10 years, and the move to RAID disks were considered overdue. So I guess the tape robot was, at the very latest, installed around 1995.
For example a database with encrypted columns. Where is the key?
Certainly an essential question. But it is the same regardless of which backup technology you choose. With one slight modification: When I am in physical control of the backup media, I consider encryption for the purpose of the backup itself to be less important. If I were to send the files to some other backup service, there is a lot more that I would encrypt. But I take your scenario to mean a database encryption that is done in any case, not just for backup purposes.