>recently had a data loss scare at work due to a failing drive, was able to recover everyhing though
>made me realize i really ought to be doing backups of my personal PC
What's the ideal strategy to do backups? Taking full image backups of my drive is probably excessive, right? But I also have files I care about outside of only the Documents folder, which is what some people tell me to backup.
Should I start organizing my files so that everything I care about is in one folder, maybe my user folder or something, then back that up to my external drives?
 Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
 |
Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
rsync
All manner of ways, friend.
What I prefer myself is to make a folder structure in the backup drive that matches my main drive containing my files, and copy my files to the same folders on the backup drive, that tells me where I got them from. Unless it is my Documents folder, I don't need to be reminded how to copy my files over from the backup for that.
Backup anything of value.
(OS drive):users(you)Appdata may have app and browser settings you'd like to keep, for instance, you'd have to rummage through that. It all depends and what you use and what matters to you.
If you have a lot of stuff in your Downloads folder, consider saving that as well to save you time on returning to those webpages and redownloading those things.
How do you guys deal with file history? Do you just overwrite any documents that had changes? Conversely, this also means to keep files which you already (purposefully) deleted.
i have two external disks as mirrored zfs (on luks).
i `rsync -Hai --delete` the directories i care about on a regular basis (/home, /etc, and /otherstuff) and scrub every couple months
(this means i have redundancy/reliability - NOT history of deleted stuff. by definition i dont care about stuff i've deleted; in case of accidental deletion, i must notice before performing my next backup so that i can restore. restoration is a simple rsync or copy in the opposite direction.)
(i partition the disks to get an exact known size so in the future i can replace with a disk that might not be *exactly* the same size)
oh, and if i cared to do it, i could achieve history with zfs snapshots. i've used the feature once or twice ever, and not on my own backups.
I recently discovered random files have been disappearing on my 13yo ntfs drives. They test as 100% healthy. I only discovered it when going through my logs and noticed photos from 2009 had been deleted from my differential backup. I checked the folders and saw that the. raw files were missing.
>at work
i dont care about work's data. they put insane strain on their drives without care
>Taking full image backups of my drive is probably excessive, right?
Can be annoyingly slow. Incremental or differential backup at the block/filesystem/file level with the occasional full backup is a good option. Near realtime incremental filewise also probably works.
> then back that up to my external drives
To a large storage capacity NAS.
I rsync most of my home directory based on file modification timestamps. I do it every week on a drive if I got anything done on that drive. Simple as that, just rsync. Make sure you physically disconnect your backups so that you can't wipe them by accident.
yeah, doing full image backups frequently is excessive. I don't do them anymore, but I used to make one every one to three months. they're not meant to be a backup of my data, per se, but they're meant to save me a lot of time in the event of data loss by providing me with a fairly recent snapshot of my machine that I can restore with the os already installed, along with software, settings, configs, etc. so getting my system back is just a matter of updooting it and copying stuff from my actual backup. one hour tops
now I just do a weekly backup using rsync of all the directories that hold data I care about, and a redundancy I update every three weeks. some folders are high priority and I back them up immediately on change, like my folder for password databases. if you're organized like me, you can keep track of multiple locations to backup. if you don't wanna bother with all that, you can keep everything in one spot. it's whatever suits you, just make sure it's a routine that you'll stick to
I used to do image backups, but it's can be a problem if you want to move to a smaller disk or it'd be a good idea to just install a later version of your disto.
Now I just rsync my home directory and save a couple of config files along with a list of manually installed packages. That way if my driver where to crash right now, I could just clean install the new version of my distro and then restore my home directory and those configs and even reinstall all the same packages I had.
Is there a way to use rsync without the "sync" aspect. By that I mean:
>I have file x, y and z on Disk 1.
> I sync them to Disk 2.
> After which I delete file x and y on Disk 1
Logic would dictate that syncing after this would replace the deleted files on Disk 1 From Disk 2
Is there a way to not have this happen?
no. you specify what you sync.
example you always sync Disc 1 to Disc 2.
if you put an option --delete when syncing D1 to D2, everything that isn't on D1 will get deleted on D2.
so "rsync --delete D1 D2" would delete X and Y on D2 because they dont exist on D1 anymore.
without -- delete option X Y would stay on D2 and everything new on D1 would also be copied
put important files to cloud AND to external drive
Backblaze (set up an encryption key first) plus Windows’ equivalent of Time Machine
Since I already have syncthing figured out I'm planning on just using that to sync a couple folders I care about between my desktop and a Raspberry Pi with a giant SD card. Anything beyond that doesn't seem to be worth the effort to me
optical media + paper + slc
Why would I send my backups to Salt Lake City?
What's the alternative to rsync on winblows?
FreeFileSync
If Windows, File History; if macOS, Time Machine; if Linux, DejaDup or rsync. If you want _real_ backups, follow the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, two different mediums (drives, whatever), one is off-site.
I use git and aws. I can reformat my computer in the morning and be up and running again by the afternoon. I'm basically backing up continuously and with good versioning.
This only really works for me though bc all the data I care about is code/text.
Backblaze. I used to be skeptical of that sort of service but then I tried it. The initial backup took several days, obviously, but incrementals happen basically in real time. I have it on my PC and on my MacBook. I kind of resent having to pay full price twice, but other than that I'm 100% happy.
Time Machine was the one thing I liked on OS X that was actually seamless and "just worked". All these years later and there hasn't been a single piece of software for Windows I've found that is as easy and frictionless for backups as Time Machine, and I've been willing to pay good money for it.
I mostly agree with you, with the caveat that Time Machine to a directly attached drive worked wonderfully, but Time Machine over the network has never been reliable for me.
omg nigs just use borg
>Should I start organizing my files
Yes.