Backups: You're doing 'em wrong!

If you're relying on Google or Apple to back up your data, or you just have a hard drive plugged into your computer, your data's at risk!

In this video I explain the 3-2-1 backup rule, and how I made a custom backup plan to make sure I never lose any important data.

#Backups #Homelab #RaspberryPi

Contents:

00:00 - It's a disaster
00:55 - Easy as 1-2-3
02:02 - Taking an inventory
04:53 - Backup Pi
06:03 - My Backup Plan
07:35 - Room for improvement
08:12 - Two types of people

[MrWachtus]

Hey that's me 😂
Thanks for mentioning gickup

[codemonkeyhacks]

That smile on your face after the nail gun - priceless!

[wilco]

Don't forget to make sure to have an offline backup to prevent data loss if you get hacked

[iScherma]

"You can almost always do better than you are right now."
This is applied to pretty much everything.

[chuckcrizer]

The most important and most useful video you have ever made.
Backups are absolutely vital.

[YeOldeTraveller]

I have a friend who says the following:
You don't want a Backup Plan. You want a Restore Plan with Backup as but the first step. And if it has not been tested, you don't have a plan.

[mtargetproduction]

"If my entire network rack got Thanos snapped... I'd be okay"

Don't lie Jeff, we know you'd be sad

[fairbanksFUMC]

This is so true. I have one 10TB HDD that holds everything for the videos I make. A couple months ago, the folder holding hundreds of raw files that hadn't been used yet vanished. Two days and $100 for a copy of Disk Drill later, I got it back. I need to implement a proper backup that involves more than just dragging and dropping folders when I remember to, and this video reminded me of why.

[skwashua]

Very well explained. After losing a bunch of photos years ago, I’ve learned my lesson.

Everything in the house get backed up to a raid redundant NAS, then multiple times a day rsync to an external drive and the whole things is backed up to backblaze.

[midjetville]

You missed the most important part of this: testing your backups!

If you don't try to restore from your backups (e.g. the stuff in Glacier) until after you have a disaster, you may be in for serious pain when you discover the backups weren't working like you thought they were.

Another issue is versioning data - what happens when your data gets cryptolocked, and you automated systems back up the cryptolocked files on top of your good backups? ZFS is great for this... :)

[baldpolnareff]

For stuff like photos that you really care about, another extra backup could be a collection of archive grade blu rays, they're not that expensive when you factor in how long they last compared to HDDs or SSDs, as long as you store them properly.
Just an extra level of redundancy that I see suitable for personal family photos and things of that great importance that aren't as heavy as videos.

[test]

Excellent tips on backups, recovery and testing in current ransomware age...I would add encryption to sensitive data and don't forget backing up your private keys!

You won me when you said “the cloud is just someone’s else computer.” Great video. And yeah, I have a NAS, but gotta make an offsite backup fast

[IsmaelLa]

OMG I need one of those "The Cloud is someone else's computer" shirts!😀👋

[bummers]

Back in R&D in the 90s, one of the director would bring a physical tape backup of the source code offsite on top of the onsite tape backups.
Then one day the senior software engineers responsible for maintaining scripts for the backups realised that the backups were not working.

They never quite test the restoration part.

[chrisb.]

Im pretty happy with my solution.

- PC's using Active Backup for Bussiness -> Synology NAS

- Servers using Proxmox Backup Server -> Synology NAS

- Synology NAS -> external HDD

- Synology NAS -> Synology C2 Cloud

So I always got 3 copies

[Zed]

This is very good advice. I used to manage disaster recovery for a bank. When I took over, the first test we ran where the previous guy was handing over to me, went well but the tests only tested they could carry on the next day. I did some more digging and much to the disgust of the guy I took over from I reported it as a total failure. I'd discovered that we'd not be able to process weekend, month end and year end. We had on-site backups off all that data but nothing off-site so make sure that all your important data goes to all 3 backups.

[questionmark]

Red shirt Jeff is definitely the most safety conscious agent of chaos I've come across.

[cphrpunk]

I once ran email for a 40, 000 user email system (120, 000 aliases), we had 9 copies of Exchange data and 5 of all the various other systems configs. And even then we lost some mailboxes due to VERY specific failure modes.

You can’t have too many backups.

Side note: I hate email.

[JamesBos]

Re: router backups. Having recently restored my pfSense box from backup after catastrophic failure, I can attest that their backup configuration mechanism is pretty amazing.