If I have a home server connected to Proton Drive for example, would that be sufficient to back up my data?
The common wisdom about backups is the 3-2-1 backup strategy, which recommends:
- 3 total copies of your data, including your original or “production” data
- 2 different forms of media
- 1 off-site copy
Proton Drive can be a decent off-site backup, but it would be a good idea to make a separate backup of your data on a different form of media like an external hard drive, just in case Proton Drive goes down, or the data there gets corrupted and you need to restore a known good version.
Since my current data store isn’t massive at the moment, if I have a fire (and I’m home), part of my plan is to grab my NAS on the way out.
But I still have off-site backup (and a local duplicate of my data).
Just always keep in mind that you might not be home and that this might not be your priority in the heat of the moment (no pun intended).
But I still have off-site backup
I also have extensive emergency planning that’s documented and practiced. I know what’s valuable, and what isn’t. Valuable stuff is already protected or planned for, not stuff I need to grab.
If I needed to leave, right now, I’d be out the door in under 5 minutes and have 3 day’s supply of food and water (with a compact cook kit), a week of clothes including cold-weather gear, phone chargers, batteries, flashlights, blankets, spare sunglasses, medicines, first aid kit, a small tool kit, spare glasses, etc, etc. And this list of stuff is documented.
Grabbing my little 5lb NAS is a trivial add-on that was only added to the list once everything else was organized. And it has its own bag, only need the NAS and power supply. I’ve added a handle to it (mostly to make it easy to move around), and everything has large, clear labels (no guessing which power supply goes with what device).
You guys have backups?
Acceptable for what? What do you, personally, consider an acceptable amount of loss, and time and money spent on recovery?
I don’t have any life-or-death critical data, so I have one local backup in case I corrupt my server again. If my house has a fire or flood, or lightning strikes and fries everything, or my stuff gets stolen, that loss is acceptable to me.
Would that be sufficient
No.
3-2-1
Three copies; your working copy, and a cloud copy, and (as an example) on and external HD that you keep at a friend’s house….
On two separate media… so yes cloud can cover that
One off site. So yeah cloud covers that.
Encryption on your off site copies. Yeah I don’t care if they are Linux ISOs or your grandmas recipes. ENCRYPTED
Thanks for coming to my TED talk
And I would argue that all data should be encrypted now, even the working copy. If you have data that’s worth backing up, you probably don’t want it in the hands of criminals or weirdos either.
It’s so easy to set up, just tick a box during os install most times. Then if you do rcline just use an encrypt on top of your remote, make sure your conf is backed up, and you’re golden
If you tick the encryption box during install, you will have to enter the decrypt password at every boot and that means that if the power goes out for long enough (UPS doesn’t keep the server up for hours), I (and my family) will not have access to the self hosted stuff until I’ll be home and this is why I encrypt only the data partition and not the boot one.
I’d say yes for home use that’s perfectly fine.
Lots of people here teach you the 3-2-1 rule. Which is how it’s supposed to be and stick to that if you’re a business or have valuable data… But that’s also not the whole picture.
I think more important than the actual number of backups is to make sure they work. I’ve seen computers where the backup or cloud sync failed and no one noticed. And after the harddisk got damaged they got aware of the fact that the last successful backup ran 9 months ago… Or people started to save things in a different directory and that drive wasn’t part of the backup. Or the backup was encrypted and the key got lost together with the original data.
I personally am a bit cheap on the third backup. I replace that with an old external drive and copy my vacation pictures there every half a year or so. Just don’t store that next to the computer so everything burns down together. I’d say that’s more than enough. And your cloud backup already does 99% of the job. It’s at a (physically) different location and does all the really important tasks (for home use.)
Monitoring if the backup task succeeded is important but that’s tue easy part of ensuring it works.
A backup is only working if it can be restored. If you don’t test that you can restore it in case of disaster, you don’t really know if it’s working.
Correct. What it appears to be and what it is, are often two very different things. And people often underestimate situations like desaster recovery… Everything is fine and dandy on the day you configure the backup job. But once you need it, that day is a desaster and everything has gone wrong. Now you need your plan to work flawlessly. And there are a lot of things that can go wrong, I’ve only highlighted a few of them. And lots of people have been burned by that before. There is only one way to make sure it works, and that is to test the whole procedure. And ideally not just once right after you configured it because things can go wrong later on, too.
