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Comment by qwerta | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

Just use ZFS. It works.

But, as with the old adage "RAID is not backup", don't forget that ZFS is not a backup either.

ZFS has bugs like any other codebase, and metadata corruption will make your whole pool unrecoverable. RAID-Z and block checksums won't save you from that.

I speak from personal experience with ZFS. Backups are important, no matter what filesystem you use.

ZFS is a good answer to the question "Do you do anything to check against corruption?"

If you're doing differential backups on external USB disks (generally of dubious reliability), you definately want some integrity checking. Bitrot happens!

I'm using ZFS on my home server. The backups of my main system are created with the ubuntu desktop utility and written to the server via NFS. This means I have incremental backups and the backups themselves are protected from a hardware failure using raidz. A problem with this approach is the possibility to rm -rf /mnt/backup - that's why I only start and mount the server when I need it. It's not running 24/7.

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.

If you are not checking it, how do you know your drives are not flipping bits?

Using Windows? Try ExactFile

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

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.

I actually did a wipe and clean install of my computer a few months ago. I couldn't think of a single thing to keep so I didn't and the only thing I've reinstalled since then is Chrome.

What's a backup?

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