

Today is World Backup Day – a friendly reminder to backup and check restores - sammularczyk
http://worldbackupday.com

======
deanclatworthy
A friendly reminder to everyone. RAID is not backup:
[http://serverfault.com/questions/2888/why-is-raid-not-a-
back...](http://serverfault.com/questions/2888/why-is-raid-not-a-backup)

For your home, consider an offline service such automatically backing up to a
NAS as well as an online service such as Crashplan or Backblaze.

~~~
jreed91
Has anyone created a backup app that interfaces with glacier?

~~~
deanclatworthy
Arq works quite nicely with Glacier:
[http://www.haystacksoftware.com/blog/2012/11/arq-cloud-
backu...](http://www.haystacksoftware.com/blog/2012/11/arq-cloud-backup-for-
mac-adds-support-for-amazon-glacier/)

~~~
nanch
And they have a special discount for Arq 4 today.

[https://store.haystacksoftware.com/?product=arq4&c=YAH4KD2AT...](https://store.haystacksoftware.com/?product=arq4&c=YAH4KD2ATEWH7RPJ)

~~~
DomBlack
I'd been thinking about buying Arq for the last month or so, thank you for
posting this link, it made buying Arq a no brainer.

How come it isn't advertised anywhere on their site or blog? I checked for one
this morning!

------
eps
Did you mean

    
    
      Today is a made-up day to drive traffic to
      our highly prized Sponsors and Offers page
    
      That also used to be one Reddit's feel-good
      community projects until guy in charge filed
      for copyright and grabbed it all to himself.
    

? Yes, it's an excellent and widely recongnized holiday.

~~~
nanch
It looks like the WBD website got rid of the 'deals' page this year.

If you're not a fan of the trademark on World Backup Day™, we have another
trademark-free event called Backup Week. :)

[https://backupweek.com/the-road-to-backup-week](https://backupweek.com/the-
road-to-backup-week)

World Backup Day™ does not endorse and is not associated with Backup Awareness
Week

~~~
abcd_f
You are exactly the same, except you call it the "Deals $" page.

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amirmc
Please also remember that a backup is only as good as the restore process. If
you've never had cause to test that your restore process works as intended
then you're still vulnerable.

PS: I admit that while I keep backups, I've not once checked that I can
actually restore (but I know I should). I suspect many people are the same.

~~~
hugs
This is why I make bootable backup copies of my laptop's internal hard drive
to external USB drives. Right after the backup is done, I test it by booting
from the USB drive to make sure everything worked. (I use Carbon Copy Cloner.
I have no affiliation with them other than liking their product.)

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elorant
I had a conversation the other day with a bunch of wedding photographers and
it’s amazing how much money they spend on a yearly basis on backup. They all
shoot raw and they end up with something like 50-60GB of data per event. And
that’s only for photographers, videographers are on a completely different
scale.

Now, their number one problem isn’t storage per se, since cost per TB is
constantly dropping, but uploading data to the cloud. It takes them anything
from days to a full week to upload data.

So here’s my $64.000 question. Why hasn’t anyone tried to disrupt this
industry? How about setting up a cloud backup company that sends you a
portable disk where you write your data and then send it back. From my
understanding money isn’t an issue, they would gladly pay tens of dollars on a
monthly fee if someone could handle all their backup issues for them.

~~~
andrewryno
At least some large cloud storage providers offer it. For example, AWS has
Import/Export[0] and Google has Offline Disk Import for Google Cloud
Storage[1].

[0] [http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/](http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/)

[1] [https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/early-
access](https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/early-access)

~~~
elorant
Oh nice, I didn't know that. Thanks a million :)

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qwerta
Lets talk about something exiting for a change, what is your personal backup
policy? Here is mine:

\- I backup my online accounts every two weeks. Google has full export
including GMail:
[https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1045788?hl=en](https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1045788?hl=en)
. For some websites I use scripts to do website mirroring.

\- I make full phone backup every two weeks

\- I have incremental daily backups inside computer. So I have daily snapshots
of my data for past 5 months.

\- I have two USB harddrives, I make full backup 2x a week, every time on
different USB hdd.

\- online store where I backup every week (slow internet connection)

\- and there is a physical off-site backup I do once a month

~~~
ciniglio
Do you do anything to check against corruption (e.g. bit flipping)? I've been
experimenting with md5deep recently to accomplish this, but it's a little
time-consuming. I'd be very interested in hearing about more efficient ways of
dealing with this problem.

~~~
qwerta
No, except daily snapshots. If I would find main version corrupted I can
always recover old version a few month back. I

I found bit flipping problematic only when transferring larger amount of data
over network.

~~~
IgorPartola
If you are not checking it, how do you know your drives are not flipping bits?

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ryandrake
Funny timing. Had a near-panic last night where I almost had to tell my wife I
lost the last 2 years worth of photos because backups are stale. Fortunately,
they were all found on an old laptop, so disaster averted.

I spent last night looking into off-site backup solutions, and haven't yet
found one I would be willing to pay for. They all seem to require strange
client software to work. Is there anything out there where I can set up an
account and simply have cron rsync everything over every week? Why do I need a
Java GUI (Crashplan) or some 3rd party python script (Glacier) to do a task
that doesn't change week to week?

~~~
mey
Not sure if you consider Tarsnap to be a "strange client"

[https://www.tarsnap.com/](https://www.tarsnap.com/)

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izzydata
I can't afford 10 more terabytes of space to create a backup right now. Guess
I'll just pick 50gb of non video content to back up.

Also what is the basis for the claim that 33% of people have never backed up
anything? It seems like it would be far higher than that, but I'm not really
sure what they consider having done a backup. Copying a picture off your
camera to your computer might be considered a backup to them.

~~~
Kluny
Not to mention, "29% of all disasters are caused by accidents". What on earth
are the rest caused by? I'm sure a few are caused by malice, but I strongly
doubt that it's 61%.

~~~
Thrymr
I read the icon to mean 29% of data loss is caused by human error, as opposed
to hardware failure, etc. How that's measured, I have no idea (the citation is
"Safeware, 2001" for what it's worth).

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BorisMelnik
My personal backup plan for family photos and non-work stuff:

Keep 2 copies on 2 external HD's. 1 gets backed up twice a year and put into a
safe deposit box at the bank. One gets backed up once a month and put stored
in filing cabinet in our house. I will also make backups onto DVD
occasionally.

In addition to these local backups, I run a daily job to backup to an FTP &
dropbox.

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nodata
Where are the offers? Show us the offers!

Edit: SpiderOak has unlimited storage:
[https://spideroak.com/blog/20140327085145-spideroak-
offers-u...](https://spideroak.com/blog/20140327085145-spideroak-offers-
unlimited-storage-honor-world-backup-day)

~~~
nanch
Here are some offers:
[https://backupweek.com/deals](https://backupweek.com/deals)

Edit for completeness: CrashPlan
[https://www.code42.com/store/#/?d=GET_BACKUP_WBD2014](https://www.code42.com/store/#/?d=GET_BACKUP_WBD2014)

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chimeracoder
I wish that they included options for Linux too.

What Linux backup tools do people use? Currently I'm making do with a bash
script that's just a wrapper around rsync, but it'd be nice to have something
a little more powerful, especially with the option to back up things to
glacier, etc.

~~~
iancarroll
I use tarsnap for all my backups, but that's a service as well as a tool.

This is my daily crontab:
[http://pastie.org/8982530](http://pastie.org/8982530)

~~~
icebraining
Same here. Just did a full backup of my VPS:

    
    
                   Total size Compressed size
      All archives 3.7 GB     1.5 GB
    

Deduplication ftw.

~~~
cperciva
That's just showing the compression (deflate). Deduplication is why "(unique
data)" line which you didn't paste will be lower.

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andmarios
Not sure why but this site makes my GPU and a couple of CPU cores working at a
full load. I use Chrome 34.0.x.

~~~
sammularczyk
Hm, really? No such issues here. Could it the transform-3D SVG animation on
page load?

~~~
andmarios
I am not sure. I am on Linux and nvidia binary drivers. I have seen a fair
share of problems, especially webgl based pages eating away CPU, or new tabs
eating CPU cycles until they become active for the first time.

This is the first time though I believe that I saw a site eating GPU cycles
and this is why I mentioned it.

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Executor
Self-hosted, privacy-friendly alternative: BTSync. Enough said.

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talles
What a gorgeous site

