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.
This is something I should be doing.
I need quite a lot of space for backups and I don’t have enough space for them. I should at least start with partial backups with whatever I can fit in the storage I have.
My weak point right now is off-site, and homelab. My homelab isn’t backed up at all, and my personal data is only backed up on-site.
It’s better than nothing, but I should be doing better. I work in IT afterall. I think this is in the same vein as the mechanics car…
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
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.
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.
As someone working in IT, I don’t care about your data either. Just don’t come crawling to me for help when it all goes wrong.
That being said, one drive/drop box/Google drive/whatever cloud storage… IMO, that’s fine for personal files.
I don’t personally like the “full disk” backups for personal stuff. It seems like massive overkill. Like, you’re backing up Windows and applications that are probably out of date, and stuff… Why? Plus restoring a full disk image to a bare-metal system is a massive pain in the backside. Unless it’s a server that needs to get up and running ASAP after a failure, just back up the important/unique files (generally the user folder), and if the worst happens, reinstall everything and restore the important files.
The only point on my IT approved backup list that you don’t meet the criteria for is incremental/historical snapshots or restore points. Bluntly, if you’re okay not having those and accepting the liability that if the files get deleted by accident using a legitimate method to delete them, then that’s your risk to accept.
None of what you’re doing ruffles my jimmies. As long as you’re making an informed decision, and accepting the risks, then the rest is on you. If you don’t care, then I certainly don’t care either.