Author: describes a simple setup which probably puts him in the top 0.1% of personal users in terms of resilience to data loss.
HN: nitpick about potential problems which are present even in some industry grade data loss solutions.
HN: nitpick about potential problems which are present even in some industry grade data loss solutions.
This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
And that included the time when HDDs had a tendency to fail. And what little data loss occured was actually a grand total of 3 hours of work to recreate it.
I simply don't get the obbsession people have with data back ups for their private needs.
And so I had the great luck of paying "student rates" for a data recovery service.
That was a well worth early lesson in life :)
Most people just cannot imagine losing all their data. They think it cannot happen, or it won't matter, or it will all be fine. What we have is a problem of imagination.
I run through a simple exercise with my non techie friends whave have endless faith in technology : "if I went to your phone and laptop with a hammer right now and smash them to pieces, how much would you cry?" (Some tear up right then and there ; others still think it'd be fine until I ask some follow up questions to instantiate the risk:).
Personally, I have scanned photos of childhood and tax and immigration and education and legal records and books I purchased and work documents and client photos from side photography gig and a million other things it'd be a pain to lose. So I have a local NAS and pay a cloud backup service and have reached my comfort level of data loss risk :). "Never lost data my whole life " is pure luck, and I wish it continues, but it's a bad plan - it's a bit of "I played Russian roulette and I'm fine!" :->
(linked somewhat directly to number of my non-techie friends and family who do not have good lock on their phone)
Quite a few times I've accidentally deleted the wrong thing. Backup saved me.
If you have to do a clean install of the OS so, well, you should check first which data is actually saved as a file and which is only saved in a database of software being deinstalled...
I have never been in an automobile accident in my whole life.
I still use my seatbelt.
Now I back data up religiously. You don't think you need it, until you actually do.
Once you get bitten you strangely get obsessive about it!
Around 2005 I had the working copy on the laptop's only HDD + two backup copies on separate HDDs. The events that unfolded were as follows (timeline and details editorialised as my memory is fuzzy, but you get the idea):
- On a weekend, my laptop crashed, hard. It was on Linux and something broke. Upon reboot it fsck'd for way longer than it should have, then it yelled loudly that it failed. I had some bootable live USB thing, but that Linux outright refused to mount it. A quick analysis/recovery attempt showed that the ext2 data structures were all messed up. The few files it managed to recover were either unimportant or a garbled mess. The disk was fine hardware-wise, but software failed and resulted in unrecoverable corruption.
- No worries! I had a - weekly - backup from a few days before (Thu) so worst case I lost Friday's work on my Master's thesis work. Annoying but I can manage. I plug in the drive and even before attempting to mount the device greets me with a defying clicketyckicetyclick. The disk is physically dead.
- I'm now anxiously looking at my last - monthly - backup drive, which, since the next one was due some time the following week, was almost a month old. I'll have to scramble to redo shit for my Master, but, at least, a decade of keepsakes and digitised paperwork would be fine, right? RIGHT?? I plug it in. I hear a faint puff of magic smoke. The disk does not power up. Something in the disk controller is dead somewhere, and it's the kind that is straight USB from the board, no SATA. The disk is not produced anymore, but I somehow manage to find a presumably identical one second hand, at least as far as the part number is concerned. I swap the boards, plug USB, the disk spins up but it's unable to read meaningful data. I notice there's a small "REV4" marking on the new board, the old one is "REV1". When looking closely, some components are slightly different. Of course the identical part number is a lie. The data is there but I have no means to read it. Not within my already stretched budget anyway.
I now make sure to backup on systems with vastly different failure modes.