The novice said: "I will save my working files, but not my system and application files, as they can be always be reinstalled from their distribution disks."
The master made no reply.
The next day, the novice's disk crashed. Three days later, the novice was still reinstalling software.
If that's your situation, it might be worth backing up applications. However, there are better solutions that make this irrelevant. For instance, using NixOS, you can literally back up a single text file describing your system setup, and you can recreate the system from it automatically in minutes, guaranteed to be bit for bit identical.
In my experience that works in box like 80% of the time. Which is great! But a backup is great in case it doesn’t.
If you are wondering ‘How are you getting that much failure’, it’s because I like to freeze older versions and they often decay for one reason or another (can’t get files for example)
A novice asked the master: “What must I do to learn the Zen of Backup?” The master whacked the novice in the head, grabbed the keyboard, and ran sudo rm -rf /. The novice smiled and left feeling enlightened.
The $/TiB storage cost currently creates weird choices in backup media... even making some older media formats economical again. Just finished a consumer storage option survey yesterday.
Even if you account for consumer drive+spare cost, a 8TB HDD is still the best JBOD option. For under several dozen 25GB projects, the BD-R disc drive is currently the cheapest media backup option (about 35% cheaper than HDD above 12TiB). Note 50G and 100G BD EOL media are actually equal to or a worse deal than HDD.
Also, HPE LTO9 18GB Tapes are currently around 5 to 15 times cheaper than HDD and SSD in terms of data storage cost, but the fixed cost of tape auto-loaders and drives don't always make sense until you have a significant amount of backup data. Tapes may also create a single point of failure in use... so incremental backups are a non-zero risk, and triple redundant hardware is required (old hardware gets hard to find.)
The classic joke is still true: "Fast, cheap, or good.. choose any two..."
I looked in to the bluray thing and concluded it just doesn't make sense at any level. You have to buy a bluray writer which will become increasingly rare, and then you are limited to 25GB disks where you have to factor in a chunk of that will go unused as each project won't fit on exactly 25gb.
For the effort you are expending, just getting a hard drive makes way more sense even if the $/gb is technically a little worse. The utility of hard drives is much better.
Blu-ray, or any non-rewritable optical media, guarantees that it hasn't been tampered with. If I were attacked by malware, I like the confidence that the Blu-ray backup is absolutely guaranteed to be the same as on the date it was written. A hard disk used for backup might have been reattached to the network at some point after the initial backup and gotten infected/corrupted/altered.
> Blu-ray, or any non-rewritable optical media, guarantees that it hasn't been tampered with.
In terms of external tampering, I think that need is better-served by encrypting everything, which you probably want to do anyway. Or at least using some sort of checksum signed by a key.
However if the focus is "what if the backup process is compromised", then yes, having some date which is beyond its writing-reach may be useful. Another aspect of this might be a remote-backup system where one set of credential is enough for daily backups and restore, while another is needed in order to access a set of older duplicates that are remotely maintained as ransomware-protection.
>I looked in to the bluray thing and concluded it just doesn't make sense at any level.
I mostly agree, but the 25GB M-Disc EOL media format is fairly interesting for archival purposes. The gamble actually made sense in this rare instance as each active project folder still fit on one disc, and the $120USD omnidrive firmware drives should keep the retro-equipment running for a few more years. These are relatively inexpensive even with a spare unit in the box.
>just getting a hard drive makes way more sense
In many cases this can be true, but the 3 years of HDD flight time compared to the 7+ year SSD wear life is also fairly close. It is weird, but the cost of higher capacity 18TB/24TB HDD also no longer make sense for JBOD either... unless you are hitting rack space constraints. =3
It isn't too expensive for my use case – per month, I retrieve about 500GB a month from Glacier Instant Retrieval to verify, which costs ~$15. Combined with other costs, my monthly bill is ~$50.
I used to use Backblaze B2, which was much cheaper (I think ~$5/TB/mo, with free egress up to 3x all current storage?) But at some point AWS opened a datacenter near me, and I couldn't ignore how much faster data transfers got.
AWS is an option up to 30TiB, but also feeds into the over-provisioned data-center market pressures. The recent "rclone --gui" solution does bestow rsync/sshfs like features for Windows users now, and remote mounts are easier/cleaner to bring up. =3
In my experience that works in box like 80% of the time. Which is great! But a backup is great in case it doesn’t.
If you are wondering ‘How are you getting that much failure’, it’s because I like to freeze older versions and they often decay for one reason or another (can’t get files for example)
It's not guaranteed to be bit identical (the why of it is a can of worms), but it's identical enough for all practical purposes.
> The novice became suspicious and said: "Master, is all this 'Tao of Backup' stuff just so you can sell more copies of Veracity?"
> The master said: "Now you are truly enlightened."
For reference: a comprehensive backup + security plan for individuals https://nau.github.io/triplesec/
I have neither a macbook nor an iphone
That is horribly written.
After reading the title, but before visiting the link, thought this was a backup of all of Terrance Taos work.
I miss the World Wide Web, man...
Social media cannibalized most of the interesting blogs, and 92% of people no longer have the patience to scroll more than 1/2 a page of text. =3
Not to be confused with the Zen of Backup…
A novice asked the master: “What must I do to learn the Zen of Backup?” The master whacked the novice in the head, grabbed the keyboard, and ran sudo rm -rf /. The novice smiled and left feeling enlightened.
I like that the site is simple text (if not plain writing), but even in 1997 this multi-page layout would've a pain to read vs. a single page.
I read all the steps, but not yet enlightened.
> But the master had already overwritten it with a copy of DOOM.
A master after my own heart.
Haven't seen that in ages and thought it had moved. 20GB tape containing all the corporate goodies. That makes me smile.
That should still be the case today.
Other than photos, music and videos, everything I have ever done in the last 40 years is 1.57Gb.
Media is where it got expensive.
The $/TiB storage cost currently creates weird choices in backup media... even making some older media formats economical again. Just finished a consumer storage option survey yesterday.
Even if you account for consumer drive+spare cost, a 8TB HDD is still the best JBOD option. For under several dozen 25GB projects, the BD-R disc drive is currently the cheapest media backup option (about 35% cheaper than HDD above 12TiB). Note 50G and 100G BD EOL media are actually equal to or a worse deal than HDD.
Also, HPE LTO9 18GB Tapes are currently around 5 to 15 times cheaper than HDD and SSD in terms of data storage cost, but the fixed cost of tape auto-loaders and drives don't always make sense until you have a significant amount of backup data. Tapes may also create a single point of failure in use... so incremental backups are a non-zero risk, and triple redundant hardware is required (old hardware gets hard to find.)
The classic joke is still true: "Fast, cheap, or good.. choose any two..."
Best of luck =3
I looked in to the bluray thing and concluded it just doesn't make sense at any level. You have to buy a bluray writer which will become increasingly rare, and then you are limited to 25GB disks where you have to factor in a chunk of that will go unused as each project won't fit on exactly 25gb.
For the effort you are expending, just getting a hard drive makes way more sense even if the $/gb is technically a little worse. The utility of hard drives is much better.
Blu-ray, or any non-rewritable optical media, guarantees that it hasn't been tampered with. If I were attacked by malware, I like the confidence that the Blu-ray backup is absolutely guaranteed to be the same as on the date it was written. A hard disk used for backup might have been reattached to the network at some point after the initial backup and gotten infected/corrupted/altered.
> Blu-ray, or any non-rewritable optical media, guarantees that it hasn't been tampered with.
In terms of external tampering, I think that need is better-served by encrypting everything, which you probably want to do anyway. Or at least using some sort of checksum signed by a key.
However if the focus is "what if the backup process is compromised", then yes, having some date which is beyond its writing-reach may be useful. Another aspect of this might be a remote-backup system where one set of credential is enough for daily backups and restore, while another is needed in order to access a set of older duplicates that are remotely maintained as ransomware-protection.
>I looked in to the bluray thing and concluded it just doesn't make sense at any level.
I mostly agree, but the 25GB M-Disc EOL media format is fairly interesting for archival purposes. The gamble actually made sense in this rare instance as each active project folder still fit on one disc, and the $120USD omnidrive firmware drives should keep the retro-equipment running for a few more years. These are relatively inexpensive even with a spare unit in the box.
>just getting a hard drive makes way more sense
In many cases this can be true, but the 3 years of HDD flight time compared to the 7+ year SSD wear life is also fairly close. It is weird, but the cost of higher capacity 18TB/24TB HDD also no longer make sense for JBOD either... unless you are hitting rack space constraints. =3
I've been down "LTO at home?" rabbit-hole... I nearly ended up buying a SAS HBA, until I realized that S3 Glacier is tape-as-a-service.
S3 is too expensive to do a restore from. And you have to restore to verify.
It isn't too expensive for my use case – per month, I retrieve about 500GB a month from Glacier Instant Retrieval to verify, which costs ~$15. Combined with other costs, my monthly bill is ~$50.
I used to use Backblaze B2, which was much cheaper (I think ~$5/TB/mo, with free egress up to 3x all current storage?) But at some point AWS opened a datacenter near me, and I couldn't ignore how much faster data transfers got.
AWS is an option up to 30TiB, but also feeds into the over-provisioned data-center market pressures. The recent "rclone --gui" solution does bestow rsync/sshfs like features for Windows users now, and remote mounts are easier/cleaner to bring up. =3
Nice Epilogue
HTTPS cert is invalid
there is no cert, it's http://
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