The first was when the telephone pole outside our house was struck directly by lightning. Not only was it the loudest thing I have ever heard, the current surged through the telephone line, into the internal fax modem, and fries everything within its vicinity. I was 10. I did have backuos, but only only floppy and they didn't cover everything.

The second was storing data in OneDrive - a change to their terms surrounding "lifetime" unlikely noted storage, combined with a client that was unusably slow to download and a deadline for data retrieval meant that I lost most of my files.

The third was SD card failure in digital camera on holiday, the controller chip died catastrophically, leaving the card completely unrecognised. It was a brand new Sony 128GB card, manufactured by Toshiba, and it seemed to be a common issue. I now shoot to two cards simultaneously.

And the fourth time was ... Performing a backup. An errant script deleted the source content, but I'd also deleted the existing backup to free up space for the new backup. I've been weary of using rewritable media for some time now as a consequence, but I think backups themselves are high risk activities.

don't be like me folks

    [1]: https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid
    [2]: https://du.nkel.dev/blog/2026-05-16_rootless_docker_virtiofs_proxmox/

  We are not in the backup business.  We are in the restoration
  business.

This is an empirical claim, but is it grounded in reality?

99% of people don't backup, and that's probably the right choice because the risk is low, they can't meaningfully improve their restoration rate themselves and they don't care enough about their data to classify its loss as catastrophic.

When a person hears someone talk about the importance of backups, but also haven't heard friends/family suffer this date, they will rightfully ignore this warning.

Or do we all follow the best practices as it relates to backups, exercise, sleep, nutrition, accounting, house maintenance, ... Etc.

I do not. Backups aren't near the top of that list.

This stuff just isn't very important to most people and that's okay.

All my hosts run the same CoreOS setup (https://github.com/ebrahim37/infra-template), where container volumes are placed in one central volumes/ folder and that is the only thing I have to backup.

I plan to implement it like this:

  vps1:
  - restic container with custom sh entrypoint that will backup volumes/ to homelab every 24 hours
  homelab:
  - backrest container, to back up volumes/, do prune/check, replicate repo to offsite
  - rest-server container, will store backups from vps1, homelab, offsite
  offsite:
  - restic container, backs up volumes/ to homelab every 24 hours
  - rest-server container, store copy of backups from homelab

The deduplication is nice, you can have a snapshot for each week of the past year without crazy storage cost

The issue is companies love to fire QA people who should be the ones testing these.

Microsoft says we don’t need no SDETs, our products can ship full of issues.

What are the hostages, I mean customers going to do about it?

I have no sympathy for any major corp who suffers data loss. Now individuals who lost grandmas wedding photos, that sucks.

But my recovery strategy for that is simple. After scanning I emailed it out to one cousin who emailed them out to a few more. Plus I have a cloud backup ( I have no idea where the the original files are).

Data is meant to be shared after all

The best part: it is just files, not some proprietary archive. I have high confidence in this. I can restore with the most rudimentary tools.

This setup has worked for me well on linux, windows and now mac. I migrated to new computer&os by restoring the backup mostly.

Obviously for production systems automation & monitoring is the way. I kind of like this setup on my own machine though.

https://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html

(maybe copy/paste this into browser instead of following link, since referrer from hn apparently does something)

https://relax-and-recover.org/

This is two-fold useful, first as it enables boot from backup media for total recovery, second in that it creates a backup.tar.gz that holds everything that was not explitictly ignored in the /etc/rear/local.conf file.

I'm running Oracle databases on these systems (and the local.conf is configured to ignore the datafile directories). I have standby databases (not Dataguard in that I don't have online redolog replication) that allow me to recover them to the primary in a disaster, with some loss of committed transactions.

I finally have rsync configured for some scratch temporary files.

I have dallied with btrfs snapshot replication for home directories (in a loopback mount). My vendor support (via a CSI number) has been on and off, so I don't use btrfs in areas that we need it most.

My replacements do not like the complexity (and I am retiring).

[1]: https://github.com/rsnapshot/rsnapshot/blob/master/rsnapshot...

Two weeks later they had a fire in one of their huge printing machines which caused quite a lot of direct damage due to heat and rendered a lot of equipment broken due to smoke/fumes. It was also, as it turns out, a week before the first COVID 19 lockdown in the UK.

Their backups landed on a XFS file system with reflinks enabled. I cloned their repo and fired up NFS with their VMs running on our gear. It took me another hour to spin up another OpenVPN server (CA etc) for them to use and sort out a few other details (coffee doesn't brew itself).

They ran via VPN out of our data centre for most of the pandemic.

That was an utter triumph but I also have some rather less triumphant stories about backups and lack thereof. Let's skip over those 8)

GNU tar has its own incremental index via `--listed-incremental=FILE`. Unlike Borg or Restic, which have their own more complicated repository formats, this leaves me with just one additional file (the `.snar`) alongside a dumb, portable full-disk tar archive.

The nice part is that, unlike repositories that require both read/write access patterns, tar can compute deltas using only the small `.snar` file, while the main `full-disk.tar` can remain buried in write-only Glacier storage. This makes it a much better fit for Glacier's write-once model and 180-day minimum retention.

My current plan is to upload a full-disk tar to an external HDD + Glacier on a weekly cadence, and the `.snar`-based deltas daily. That gives me a pretty simple cloud backup solution for a few bucks a month (after burning through $100+ of free credits).

Using old standardized open source tools means it survives system updates without having to fix anything for years. I got my laptop stolen/lost 3 times over the past 15 years, and I have always been able to restore everything the next day on a new laptop, in the time it takes to transfer the files over the network.

I haven't given much thought, I'm sure there is a realistic scenario where this strategy would fails but I haven't found it yet.

ZFS snapshots + restic backups to backblaze for my homeserver. My secret sauce is a healtchecks.io instance that blows up my phone if ZFS scrubs throw any errors, when local snapshots fail, or when restic checks or backups fail.

and a privesc also.

Most of other data i only have 2 backup, usually 1 at my local machine(code) and 1 online(github). Yeah it's not ideal, but another question to ask yourself, is it truly worth it. I trust the engineers at MS doing much better job at backing up their data than me.

One of my teachers claimed that contrary to common behavior, no one actually valued backups; it was restores that were worth paying for.

https://archive.is/Ay7RJ

For example:

Requirement:

"Just copy a file from folder A to folder B."

Minimal translation:

"Implement the capability to copy any file, in any format and of any size from SharePoint, located at a configurable path, with appropriate authentication and access control checks, then stream it in chunks to a different, configurable path inside an S3 bucket, also with appropriate authentication and access controls in place. Ensure that any disruption in either service which may occur while the file is streaming can be recovered from at the point it failed instead of having to restart from the beginning. Ensure that the retry mechanism is built-in and that the retry window is configurable; if the file cannot be copied within the specific time window, then an error should be sent via email to a configured email address. Ensure that the entire transfer is encrypted in transit... If the file happens to be a folder, then you must copy across all of its contents recursively up to a certain configured MAX_DEPTH to avoid DoS and ensuring that the system does not get caught in an infinite loop due to symlinks pointing to a parent folder... In this case, send an email to the configured address... Etc... Etc..."

And the thing is; if you tell AI "Just copy a file from folder A to folder B." - It will not meet your 'basic' needs because even if it does a great job at filling the gaps in your requirements, it will still take shortcuts. In order for an AI to avoid taking shortcuts, it would have to make you fill out a questionnaire and make you sign up for and configure services; it would not be a pleasant user experience. The user experience cannot be pleasant, because the AI cannot read your mind and it cannot know your intent.

Software like https://restic.net/ does a good job. Few choices of backend

Accepts stuff from pipe too so you can just pipe mysqldump or pg_dumpall without intermediate files

Very decent options for checking repo integrity, personally (well, at work too, we use it on few hundred user machines and servers) I also added "roll a dice for backup and try to restore it" test script to make sure it is working

Decent deduplication too so "store year's worth of weekly snapshot" is very sensible strategy once you exclude the "constantly changing and useless" (caches etc.) files out of it

can mount FUSE directory with all backups on sensible OSes.

https://kopia.io/ does the same +GUI but a bit worse on CLI front (it insists on keeping local config which makes scripting a bit more involved, but not much)

So who are we? A household with a localhost administrator?[0]

Then you are surely doesn't need encrypted, chunk-level corporate level bla-bla-bla.

You need a Syncthing copy to some other device not at home - and an additional backup procedure to maintain the history and protect against PEBKAC errors - which can run on your local Syncthing copy or/and the other one.

And no, nobody needs your 555GB of RAWs of sunsets/flowers/precious_family_moments you shot - not even you.[1]

[0] well considering the tone of TFA and most of the comments here

[1] that's Instagram/Google Photos/iCloud for nowadays, totally with "Remember this day N years ago?"