ArsTechnica Article on Backing Up Your Stuff via BeeStation

[jedishrfu]

This article on ArsTechnica reviews the BeeStation while providing some sound advice on developing a backup strategy:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...reat-way-to-start-getting-real-about-backups/

Dropbox is not backup. A portable hard drive is not backup. Real backup, experienced people have told me, starts with the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, two types of storage (or devices), and one copy is remote.

And yet my data backup system remains precarious. I have tried many schemes, ranging from “pay for Google Drive space and just dump it all there” to “multi-platform rsync/crontab-based headless system I try to build out with help from StackExchange.” I try not to be the person in an informercial, insisting that there must be a better way, but when it comes to backing up music, photos, cloud-based email and files, settings, and more, I am indeed that person. There has to be a better way, and it can’t just be the heavy lift of setting up a Synology NAS, right?

The sound advice was backing up to Dropbox or saving your files on an external drive is not backing up your stuff.

Rather you should have 3 copies of your files, 2 types of storage with one copy stored remotely.

I have always struggled with how to best back up my files. My system has a MacOS time machine drive enabled to capture everything that's changed. Additionally, some files are stored on Google Drive, while others are stored on external hard drives. Some are stored remotely. Some I don't back up at all.

The problem comes in when I've updated some and then can't remember where I've stored them so I make new backups.

One strategy I've done with my more static files is to store them by date last changed in a kind of simple directory tree structure:

/year-9999 / 99-month_name / 99-day_of_week/ the files

Storing this way allowed for files being updated and going into a different part of the tree so I have multiple versions of the same file without trouncing it.

It also allows me to find stuff using a rough file name or via month name or even by date or day of the week. I had toyed with building a database of sorts but decided it came with its own issues ie maintaining it while still storing the files.

I've also gotten into using Obsidian to organize them via markdown files by gleaning info from some files and making a markdown note so I can discard the file as no longer needed. This works well with emails and makes it easy to find what I'm looking for.

 

[Vanadium 50]

You can schedule them. I take backups every 15 minutes, keeping 4, every hour, keeping 24, and so on to monthly, which I delete by hand when needed. These get moved to alternate storage daily, and offsite when I get around to it - used to be weekly: I'd drive an external hard disk into work and leave it in my office.

 

[Vanadium 50]

The thing I dislike about security advice is that they don't understand that "the perfect is the enemy of the good" (it's better in the original Klingon). A less than ideal backup setup is better than no backup at all, and even 3-2-1 has issues: if your house burns down, sure you have a copy of the data, but where will you run it? (Corporations worry about this a lot)

This is, as far as I can tell, a $100 drive with bundled software selling for $200. Could they debundle it and have people buy it? Maybe. Maybe not.

 

[jedishrfu]

Yeah, I wouldn't spring for it. I hate solutions that go obsolete like 5.25" floppies and now 3.5" floppies or the famous zipdisk or low capacity memory sticks aka 128mb ...

I've saved some stuff on high-capacity CDs but worry that someday there won't be a drive that can read them.

I converted a lot of our Sony camcorder tapes to vhs then to Blu-ray and mp4 formats. The archivist I worked with suggested digital tape as a good medium.

Maybe the best thing to do is to reevaluate what's important and discard the rest. Oh well, time will tell or maybe that anticipated solar flare will tell us faster.

 

[Vanadium 50]

There are two different but related issues.

Issue #1 is "what do I do if something goes wrong?" - if my pictures of Aunt Bertha are on a hard drive and the head crashes, can I get them back? And how do I do it?

Issue #2 is the evolution of media. Backups on, say 5.25" disks are fairly worthless. Where are you going to read them? Zip drives? LS-120's?

It's also wise to toss stuff you don't really need, or at least to think about what you need. For example, do I really need to be able to go back to Windows 8? 7? XP? Will that even run today? In that sense, the pictures of Aunt Bertha are actually more important to hold on to. But the smaller the dataset you are trying to protect, the more replicas you can afford and that means the less likely you will lose it.

 

[jedishrfu]

Yes, that's my sentiment too. I kept many of my old emails that referenced some non-work topics and have been transferring them to Obsidian so I can toss them. I did the same with old magazines I had and paper notes converted to PDF then the good parts to markdown for obsidian.

We have a lot of crap from our parole protest campaigns that I need to keep but hope to dump someday.

I can see the virtue of getting books on Kindle now much less stuff to store at home.

I guess the backup issue becomes a decluttering issue after awhile especially once you retire and have time to declutter.

 

[harborsparrow]

Dropbox may not be a PERFECT backup strategy, but it's better than no backup. My partner and I moved all our files that we need to keep into DropBox so we can share them across multiple machines. So they are backed up in Dropbox's cloud as well as on every Windows computer we connect to DropBox using that account name. The one thing we had to do was make sure we install Dropbox in the same location, and using a single account name, on the file system of each computer, and MOST IMPORTANT: we have to use the "business" version of the Dropbox client, which is *not* the one they have on the Dropbox website. We have to contact Dropbox from time to time to get a link to the latest "business" client. The business Dropbox client allows all (or only some) files to be synced between a local hard drive and the cloud. We typically duplicate all the files down to the local drive and have them all update to the cloud.

With this strategy, in ten years, we have never lost important files when one of our computers crashes. We have programs such as Quicken place their backup files onto the Dropbox file space.

That said, we NEVER share our Dropbox account with any third parties--so, we do not use Dropbox for file sharing with other Dropbox accounts or outside parties. We do use it to transfer photos from our mobile phones to our desktop computers. For security reasons, we don't do any of the shared file services with people outside the home, with the exception of the fact that Gmail will force us to use Google Drive for really large email attachments.

Dropbox used in this mode costs around $100 per year, and the peace of mind is totally worth it. Before, when I didn't have backups fully automated, our backup processes were constantly running behind or not getting done at all.