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How long has it been since you last tested your backups?
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Conquering Russia should be done steppe by steppe.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Subsentient on Thursday October 29 2015, @08:52PM
Most critical data of mine is mirrored on my main desktop, laptop, netbook, and server. If one fails, I got it on the others.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 5, Informative) by basicbasicbasic on Sunday November 01 2015, @07:14PM
Mirroring protects against drive failure but not data corruption. If one copy becomes corrupted the corrupt data is mirrored to all the others and they all become corrupted.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by melikamp on Thursday November 05 2015, @05:07AM
And how is backup different? The proper way to prevent data corruption is the revision control. Backup cannot detect the original data corruption because the latter is indistinguishable from a cromulent edit. If a file becomes corrupt and then gets backed up in a corrupt state, now the backup is corrupt. If you have an older snapshot, you may be in luck, but what are the chances of that in your case? With mirrors, one can mirror, say, to target 1 on every 1st and to target 2 on every 15th of a month, and that guarantees a 2-to-4-week stale snapshot, so the situation is basically the same.
(Score: 2) by basicbasicbasic on Friday November 06 2015, @04:56PM
Having a single backup isn't something I'd recommend because, as you point out, it's really no better than mirroring. But most backup solutions do more than that.
I can only speak for Time Machine (the backup solution built in to OSX) but it does hourly backups for the past day, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for every previous week for as long as you have the disk space (mine go back to January 2013 when I first switched it on). It also lets you swap in multiple backup drives and will alternate backups between them if you have them connected at the same time.
If a file has become corrupted you skim back through the copies until you find the last good copy (it has a very nice interface for doing this).
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Friday November 06 2015, @03:28AM
If I scheduled routine mirrors, that'd be a legitimate concern, but I only back up when I feel like it or it comes to mind.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by basicbasicbasic on Friday November 06 2015, @05:17PM
It's seriously a good thing you're backing up at all, but if your data is valuable to you I'd look in to a better strategy than backing up when you feel like it. Something that keeps automatic backups can save your skin.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Friday November 13 2015, @01:51AM
I solve that problem by having an infinite army of monkeys with typewriters.
All my data is always guaranteed to be backed up, even before I generate it.
(Score: 2) by basicbasicbasic on Friday November 13 2015, @11:16PM
Ah - the Library of Babel backup strategy;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel [wikipedia.org]
https://libraryofbabel.info/About.html [libraryofbabel.info]