
The paranoid person's guide to a complete Mac backup - bemmu
http://www.macworld.com/article/2855735/the-paranoid-persons-guide-to-a-complete-mac-backup.html
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vinceguidry
I think most devs here learn to keep their laptops relatively stateless. All
important files gets offloaded to Dropbox / Github / S3, whichever service
makes the most sense. Frankly, whatever I lose if my laptop HDD dies must not
have been that important if it never made it to one of those services.

Implementing and maintaining whole-disk backup procedures and media? Shoot me
now.

~~~
asteli
I think you're underestimating how long it takes to set up workflows, tools,
device drivers, system configurations, path variables, and so forth from
scratch. If you rely solely on project repositories, I reckon you could spend
multiple man-days getting your machine back to a pre-dataloss state.

I just had a laptop stolen. Even with Time Machine backups, you still spend
many hours setting configs after a restore.

~~~
bradleyland
> Even with Time Machine backups, you still spend many hours setting configs
> after a restore.

But how many hours do you spend establishing, testing, and maintaining a
backup plan that mitigates the risk of spending a few hours getting back to
working status after a restore?

In my experience, TimeMachine is wonderfully effective at restoring system
state (including things like shell customizations, dotfiles, etc). The
marginal return on investment in more comprehensive backup setup just doesn't
pay dividends. Of course, there's the issue of offsite backups, which
typically aren't as comprehensive as TimeMachine.

The point I'm making is that technical folks often have a hard time making
value judgements as it relates to technology. Having a backup of your data is
100% necessary. No argument there. Having a backup of your system state?
That's not as high a priority, because you're mitigating a future time
investment with a current time investment. You have to weigh the two against
each other: time spent today versus _potentially_ time spent in the future.

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leni536
Many of the listed "paranoid" backups suffer from a single point of failure:
your computer. If your computer gets compromised then it can silently
erase/cryptolock files on your computer or even on your backup drives in the
rare event when they are connected. IMO in practice it could only be feasible
with a targeted attack after a thorough investigation of your backup plan
(assuming if you don't make it public on your blog).

I don't know crashplan but AFAIK most backup services suffer from the same
problem. If you regularly enter or store account credentials for your backup
service then it can be stolen from a compromised computer and can be used to
delete backups from the past. It can be mitigated if your backup service
provides two accounts for the same backup: an "append only" account and an
"administrator" account. The idea that a compromise of the "append only"
account can't delete your past backups.

~~~
ghgr
> It can be mitigated if your backup service provides two accounts for the
> same backup: an "append only" account and an "administrator" account.

That's how Tarnsap[1] works (I think the author is the user cperciva)

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

~~~
cperciva
_Tarnsap_

Tarsnap. But yes.

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steveax
Most of my important things (and all the things that need to keep a history)
live in repositories on Github and/or Bitbucket. All the system configuration
is done via Boxen. I have 2 rotating clone drives (weekly) for quick disaster
recovery. For all the long-lived things that don't need explicit versioning I
use arq to store on S3. Arq it terrific BTW.

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bemmu
A few days ago a livecaster accidentally burned down a large part of his house
([https://youtu.be/82UsZ44AxIA?t=290](https://youtu.be/82UsZ44AxIA?t=290)).
Besides buying a fire extinguisher, that got me thinking I should have remote
backups. So far I've been only using Time Machine to back up to an external
disk in another room.

Somehow I'd like to have a periodic whole disk image of my mac that could be
downloaded and mounted on a new computer as-is. Currently investigating if I
could use Carbon Copy Cloner to do a weekly bootable disk clone and then have
that be uploaded to Dropbox.

CCC creates a huge directory called "Macintosh HD.sparsebundle". Not sure if
that's really mountable or if syncing it to Dropbox will be practical.

~~~
voltagex_
[http://pondini.org/TM/Works3.html](http://pondini.org/TM/Works3.html) \-
seems like it. I'm not sure it'd survive Dropbox - maybe a Mac user can chime
in here?

Edit: It seems perfect: [http://blog.fosketts.net/2011/07/05/mac-dropbox-
encrypted-vo...](http://blog.fosketts.net/2011/07/05/mac-dropbox-encrypted-
volume/)

The closest for Linux would be ecryptfs, but I'm not sure if it splits images
up.

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emsy
I love apps like Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper, since they allow me to
create a bootable backup of my system drive without booting into a separate
backup program. Are there similar solutions for Windows/Linux? (I only know of
Clonezilla, which is a boot system)

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serpix
I would really like a good archiving service. Backup is one thing but I can't
keep an ever growing stash of data, I want t offload this data in a redundant
way. Is there such a thing? Backup is not archiving!

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shell0x
I'm currently traveling and backup to an external hard drive and photos to
Google Drive. What's the best way to keep encrypted backups of important files
in the cloud?

I was thinking about using duplicity and S3

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chris-at
If you are paranoid don't forget to check for bitrot!

[https://www.npmjs.com/package/chkbit](https://www.npmjs.com/package/chkbit)

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roflchoppa
I used to back up stuff. now i don't.

eh. im okay with loosing stuff.

