Today is World Backup Day – a friendly reminder to backup and check restores

http://worldbackupday.com

by sammularczyk • 12 years ago

108 75 12 years ago

worldbackupday.com

andmarios2• 12 years ago

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.

sammularczyk4• 12 years ago

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

andmarios2• 12 years ago

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.

deanclatworthy3• 12 years ago

A friendly reminder to everyone. RAID is not backup: http://serverfault.com/questions/2888/why-is-raid-not-a-back...

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.

dirktheman2• 12 years ago

Crashplan or backblaze are very user-friendly, but rather expensive, too. As a cheaper alternative, you can use Amazon Glacier. It costs mere pennies a month. ($0.18 in my case, where I would spend over $5.00 a month at crashplan/backblaze). However, AWS will charge you a lot more if you ever need to get your data back in a hurry. As a last resort solution (for instance my house burns down and my off-site external harddisk gets stolen) it's excellent, though.

nodata2• 12 years ago

Crashplan and backblaze are not rather expensive, they're cheap. Five bucks a month and you don't have to do any complicated calculations when you want your data restored.

deanclatworthy3• 12 years ago

I considered the same thing. But when you are backing up several terabytes of photos and home movies collected over many years the cost of storing them on Glacier isn't as cheap as using the unlimited service of Crashplan or Backblaze ($10 a month vs $5-6 month). Furthermore, Crashplan and Backblaze don't charge you to retrieve your data unlike Glacier, which is where it gets very expensive.

jreed91• 12 years ago

Has anyone created a backup app that interfaces with glacier?

deanclatworthy3• 12 years ago

Arq works quite nicely with Glacier: http://www.haystacksoftware.com/blog/2012/11/arq-cloud-backu...

derekp72• 12 years ago

Does anyone have an open implementation of the glacier api? I'd like to add support for it to my backup tool, but I don't want to have to take on the financial risk of a large bill from Amazon if I happen to mis-use the api. So I'd like to try it out on a local server first, to project what the cost would be after a few months of use.

atYevP• 12 years ago

Yea. Backblaze is pretty rad. I work there. We just got polo shirts today!

nodata2• 12 years ago

Where are the offers? Show us the offers!

Edit: SpiderOak has unlimited storage: https://spideroak.com/blog/20140327085145-spideroak-offers-u...

nanch3• 12 years ago

Here are some offers: https://backupweek.com/deals

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

eps• 12 years ago

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.

nanch3• 12 years ago

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

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

abcd_f• 12 years ago

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

qwerta3• 12 years ago

I think in this case it is more important they remind people of an important issue. Most people do not have any sort of backups.

sammularczyk4• 12 years ago

Check the site. No sponsors/offers this year and we've taken steps to avoid what happened last time - our brand/logo is released under a loose Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs, and the content on the site is pretty much all Creative Commons.

We've got the Attribution/NonCommercial stuff in the logo license to protect against sites implying that we approve of what they're selling. We just want businesses using the logo FOR PROFIT to state that we don't endorse or promote their product. Everything else is free reign!

We definitely never intended to trademark/restrict the use of the term. We just got a bit over-enthusiastic with the legal side of things - now we're trying to put trust in the community instead (which, admittedly, should have happened in the first place).

If none of this makes sense, I'd be happy to explain it further

qwerta3• 12 years ago

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 . 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

mhurron• 12 years ago

What's a backup?

ciniglio• 12 years ago

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.

IgorPartola2• 12 years ago

Just use ZFS. It works.

qwerta3• 12 years ago

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.

hbarnwheeler• 12 years ago

Using Windows? Try ExactFile

mercurial• 12 years ago

I have a terrible backup policy, where everybody's computer is backed up every monday morning on a local server using rsnapshot. I'm thinking regularly of find some decent online backup service which is amenable to receiving VM snapshots regularly before getting distracted and forgetting about it.

Kiro2• 12 years ago

Nothing. I don't have any digital assets I care about.

icebraining3• 12 years ago

I find that surprising. Even if you don't have anything unrecoverable, like personal photos and such, just having to reinstall and reconfigure everything from scratch is more than enough reason for me to backup stuff up. Especially since I know I won't remember half of it.

chimeracoder2• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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

icebraining3• 12 years ago

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

               Total size Compressed size
  All archives 3.7 GB     1.5 GB

Deduplication ftw.

BenC88• 12 years ago

I'm using spideroak. The Linux client is actually functional.

sammularczyk4• 12 years ago

Yeah, would have loved to have something for all platforms... Haven't used Linux in a long time so I'll admit I'm unfamiliar with it all. Did try to do some research but couldn't find a solution that would cover all distros.

Next year, with more time, I'll try and add something there!

chimeracoder2• 12 years ago

but couldn't find a solution that would cover all distros.

For your purposes, it would be fine to post something that works on Ubuntu as long as you can verify that it's not Ubuntu-only (if it's open source and works on at least two distros, chances are it works on any distro)[0].

[0] Heck, even most things that are made for Ubuntu work on other distros with minimal modification - it's just a matter of convenience.

crdoconnor• 12 years ago

There are a lot:

http://skeptu.com/online-backup-service+has-client:linux-app...

driverdan• 12 years ago

CrashPlan. Works well on all major OSes but it does use a lot of memory since it's Java. You can use it to backup to their own online service or you can do peer-to-peer between systems with CP installed.

BitMastro• 12 years ago

backuppc, incremental backups, de-duplication, supports Windows/Linux with smb/ssh/nfs etc

rsync• 12 years ago

rsync.net lets you do things like this:

  mysqldump -u mysql db | ssh 1234@usw-s001.rsync.net \

"dd of=db_dump"

and this:

  ssh user@rsync.net s3cmd get s3://rsynctest/mscdex.exe

and this:

  ssh user@rsync.net "git clone git://github.com/freebsd/freebsd.git freebsd"

... and has had a "HN readers" discount for new users for many years now.

pwg• 12 years ago

rsnapshot (http://www.rsnapshot.org/) which is a wrapper around rsync.

Backups go to a local machine with a three drive linux software raid-5 array.

Occasional offsite sync to another remote Linux box.

wtbob• 12 years ago

duplicity to S3 here. I'd like to eventually figure out how to point duplicity to Glacier. And of course it'd be nice if GPG supported some more modern cyphers and modes, but it's Good Enough(tm).

jlgaddis2• 12 years ago

I don't think you can point it directly at Glacier (if I'm wrong someone please let me know) but what you can do is to set "Lifecycle" options on your S3 bucket.

I have a folder in one of my buckets, for example, that I call "archive". I put in there anything I want to store on Glacier long-time. With my lifecycle settings, objects in that folder are automatically moved to Glacier after one day.

amirmc• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.)

ryandrake• 12 years ago

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?

otibom• 12 years ago

https://backupsy.com/ ?

mey• 12 years ago

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

https://www.tarsnap.com/

talles• 12 years ago

What a gorgeous site

izzydata• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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).

jlgaddis2• 12 years ago

What about the other 10%? =)

BorisMelnik• 12 years ago

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.

elorant2• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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/

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

elorant2• 12 years ago

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

actionscripted• 12 years ago

Crash Plan already offers this: http://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/Latest/Backup/Seeded_Bac...

As I believe many larger backup services do nowadays.

Executor• 12 years ago

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

Today is World Backup Day – a friendly reminder to backup and check restores

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