@nixCraft I had a drive fail during a backup before. Head-crash. Heard a "CLACK!" and a non-stop shifting sound, then an error popped up about input/output errors.

Never know when a drive is going to fail.

@nixCraft

8 cloud just means someone else's hardware, and cloud assistants just means giving up all privacy rights

@nixCraft Number 6 is why the first thing I do at every client / employer is ask them fir their backups and if they can't provide me with 3-2-1 backup strategy and known restore times I assume they have none, so I'll backup everything and test the restore as my first move.

• This saved at least one client/employer's ass in the past...

@nixCraft

I believe in #TimeShift.

I have restored from it several times. My ex was unaware of #6, and I lost a recipe #wiki and five years of stuff I'd done in #GIMP because I thought everything was being backed up, not just their ~.

This is reason n+1 why I have two external drives for stuff I don't want to lose.

(Somewhere in n is the time they bricked my new laptop by trying to run the boot image in a #virtualBox. At the time, it was <1 week old, so I didn't really lose anything except my temper.)

I didn't actually leave until they praised TFG in a way I couldn't stomach or ignore. It's been years, and I still have habits developed to work around their cluelessness.

@nixCraft

One thing all of the make-backups posts tend to leave out is that making and testing backups is work, and that society once had a specific vocation in charge of that work among other things -- system administrators -- that capitalists have tried very hard to eliminate and push onto everyone as an individual task.

@nixCraft
"Always backup the backup of your backup."

I once had my laptop die WHILE I was copying one backup to a 2nd #backup. 🤯

"No problem!" I said, as I called all THREE of my long-distance brothers, to whom I had sent a copy of ALL my over-10,000 #Genealogy files (sorted & organized into lots of sub-sub-sub-directories).

Two had not kept any files, after browsing through the interesting family photos. 😥

The other one had kept the flash drive, so he mailed it back to me...

He had also deleted ALL the files.😱

"No problem," I said again. After all, I was married to a computer guy. Surely he could fix it...

Hubby ran a recovery program for 3 DAYS, but was only able to recover the photos and documents. ALL videos of interviews with dead relatives were unsalvagable.

To make matters worse, some files were still useless, I had many duplicates, and my directory structure was GONE

That was three YEARS ago. I'm still sorting the mess out.🤦‍♀️

#DataManagement #FileManagement #Backups

@nixCraft We also had a "do not download viruses into our home network" rule for our kids.

Enforcement was simple. When they downloaded a virus I disconnected their internet "until I had time to sort it out".

Which took two days the first time, four days the second time, a week the third time.

There wasn't a fourth time.