The importance of backups

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The importance of backups

Postby jiml8 » Jan 11th, '19, 06:16

I have a junk drawer in my /home directory. It is called RPMS (for ancient reasons that I don't recall).
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It contains lots of junk. Code fragments, old packages, odds and ends, Nvidia driver packages, a unix Galaga game that I amused myself porting a long time ago...just odds and ends that I sometimes find useful...general cyber-clutter.
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So, a couple of days ago, it vanished.
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I didn't do it. I have no idea what happened. The directory was still there, and some of the sub-directories. But all files were gone and the sub-directories that I looked in also had no files.
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My /home is hosted on an SSD, and this makes me think the SSD did something strange. Dunno.
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Well, it's just a junk drawer...do I care that much? I thought about it...but I do often enough root around in the junk drawer looking for something or other, so I decided that maybe I should put it back.
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I looked in the backups, and discovered it had been gone for 3 days before I discovered it. And, of course, I discovered it because I had gone into the junk drawer to root around for something. The backup copy from 4 days back had it.
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So, I restored it. Took 30 seconds or so.
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Now, the world would not have ended if I lost the contents of the junk drawer. But there are many other directories in /home where loss would be catastrophic.
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Good thing I had a backup, huh?
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So, do you - the person reading this - have everything backed up? If not, what are you going to do when one of your directories vanishes?
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Re: The importance of backups

Postby banjo » Jan 11th, '19, 20:00

Backed up on four different disk drives stashed in three different locations. Backups are done at least weekly. They have saved my backside more often than I could relate in this post.... failed drives, inadvertently deleted files, oopsies overwriting a good copy with a bad copy etc.

I wrote my own backup bash script so I could make it do what I want it to do, not what somebody else thought would be a good idea.

When I install a new Mageia, I do a clean install on new media and get all my stuff off the backup drive. The technique works great and keeps my backups complete and honest.

Banjo
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Re: The importance of backups

Postby filip » Jan 17th, '19, 17:49

I use rsnapshot for more than a decade. It works excellent but it take some effort to configure it but it saved me many times also. Same sources as banjo.

The only downside is from the strong side. To not consume space to much it uses hardlinks. So it happened once that I lost one file (unimportant and duplicated elsewhere) due to HDD unreadable sector error. No actual loss except some time for detective work and some learning (which is good anyway).
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