datahoarder

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Who are we?

We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.

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Overwhelmed with backups and I don't know how to improve my backup strategy. (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I should really start doing regular backups again, do the 3-2-1 backup strategy again, and organize my backups but there's so many files and stuff on my devices and external drives that it's overwhelming and I don't know how to properly sort it. ADHD kicks my ass too and I know that it takes a while to backup and that means my computer needs to idle so it can get done faster and doesn't slow my computer down.

Also, I'm struggling with cloud backups too. Google Drive and OneDrive often had errors in the middle of uploading and I'm hesitant to spend money on a cloud service. And doesn't Backblaze need you to have your device connected at least once every 30 days or your data will be deleted or something? I have ADHD and I can't guarantee I'll be on top of that. And do I upload image backups to these servers? Is that even possible? What about video game backups and other large files? Or all the videos I have? Aren't these cloud services really slow as well? I feel like I'll end up having the same problem...I could use zip files, but I keep worrying something will get removed in the middle of it.

And how do I check backups? I can't reasonably check every single file I've ever made.

I don't know how to handle all of this. I mainly use FreeFileSync for copying drives over with anything being overwritten just being moved to a Revisions folder. I also sometimes use Macrium Reflect for image backups, but the free version is being retired... I tried Veeam once but it didn't backup the AppData folder when I tried doing a file level backup about a year ago.

I have a Mac and a Windows computer by the way. I do want to check out Linux someday though.

I don't know if I can do a NAS either. I don't think I have an extra computer lying around and I'm a college student who needs to travel from home to my college campus. And I don't have a lot of room on my bedroom desk...And I hate how backups often prevent me from using one of my computers.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There are so many ways do handle backups, so many tools, etc. You'll find something that works for you.

In the spirit of sharing a neat tool that works well for me, addressing many of the concerns you raised, in case it might work for you too: Maybe check out git annex. Especially if you already know git, and maybe even if you don't yet.

I have one huge git repository that in spirit holds all my stuff. All my storage devices have a check-out of this git repo. So all my storage devices know about all my files, but only contain some of them (files not present show up as dangling symlinks). git annex tracks which drives have which data and enforces policies like "all data must live on at least two drives" and "this more-important data must live on at least three drives" by refusing to delete copies unless it can verify that enough other copies exist elsewhere.

I can always see everything I'm tracking -- the filenames and directory structure for everything are on every drive.
I don't have to keep track of where things live. When I want to find something, I can just ask which drives it's on.
- (I also have one machine with a bunch of drives in it which I union-mount together, then NFS mount from other machines, as a way to care even less where individual files live)
Running git annex fsck on a drive will verify that
- All the content that's supposed to live on that drive is in fact present and has the correct sha256 checksum, and
- All policies are satisfied -- all files have enough copies.