Also: don’t wait until you got the perfect setup. A bad/incomplete backup is better than no backup.
THIS! RIGHT HERE!
When I was young and naive about digital things, I had NO BACKUP
One day I got a new laptop. Yay me. Transfer all the data from my old hard drive using some jank-ass local network setup because young and dumb about tech still.
Six months go by, and my new laptop shit itself. Still no idea what happened, but it BSODd and a factory reset got it working again.
I still had my old laptop, so after about a week of searching on forums and reading everything I could find about how to build a pc, how laptop internals compare, data transfers, and literally anything I could so I could pull the old hard drive out without damaging anything and get at least some of my data without issue…
I lost 6 months of new stuff on a much more capable laptop, but it’s better than losing EVERYTHING.
Testing restore time is a key part of being a miracle worker. That way you can tell them it’ll take three times as long.
RAID is not a backup strategy. I use an “oh well”™ strategy. When my last hard drive failed, I said “oh well”™, bought a new SSD, and started from scratch. My patented “oh well”™ system works for both Linux and Windows. Learn how with only three easy courses, from £1495 each. Sign up today!
“Son, the time has finally come. Today I’m going to teach you TNO (Trust No One) security.”
my two-year-old stares blankly at me
I like to annoy my IT friends by saying my backup strategy is chucking what little important data I have in my free Dropbox account.
It’s not even that important; I don’t care!
For one it’s not a full, real backup strategy. That’s supposed to include multiple tiers.
Also it’s instantly synced, so if I bonk my stuff locally, it could be bonked over there and history might not be able to save me depending on the situation.
And I guess if Dropbox dies my data dies.
Some people take their data seriously enough to worry about that kind of stuff. I don’t.