I was doing some year-end clean up and organizing and ran across these photos from earlier in the fall. One of my jobs is as a Linux/Network admin but I used to work in the PC repair center when I was a student so sometimes I still hang out in there just for the less office-like environment.
One day we had a person bring in their HP laptop that “survived” a house fire. Luckily they were able to recover all of the person’s data from the SSD, but I can’t emphasize how much of that was just sheer luck. The best bet is to have some kind of offsite backup for your data before hand and I’m guessing most people here generate generous amounts of data that can’t just be shoved on Google Drive or similar. The end of the year is probably a good time to do a regular check on these things too, make sure your backups are working as intended, etc.
Anyway, just to bring it back around these were shot with a Fuji X-T2 and edited on Fedora Linux with darktable (I’m finally learning not to capitalize that d).
I bury hard drives in my backyard scribed with strange symbols on their cases. The people who find them will know what they mean …
Err I mean I use borgmatic with a variety of targets for most of my machine backups, was a CrashPlan user for years on my fileserver but their offerings aren’t great anymore. Moving the bulk of my media (photo/video/music) backups to Backblaze B2 but I’ll need a different client than borg for that. Borg really needs an S3 target. Takes a long time to start over a new archive when it’s ~4TB.
No I totally don’t do that first thing, no not at all that would be crazy nervous laugh
Yes I’m well aware of restic. I tested it several years ago but the big disadvantage was lack of compression. I’ve been using borg since right after it forked from attic. Since I’m paying for cloud back storage per GB space efficiency on disk really matters and borg was far better than restic in that regard. I’m still using CrashPlan for the remote on the fileserver but their client is very neglected and they keep removing features. The local backup is done with borg and is gets 6TB on disk down to about 4TB. My other server backups have similar good results and my desktop/laptop gets about a 50% size reduction out of it. The compression and dedup feature doesn’t seem to work as well on macOS though as from my testing the borg archive is actually larger than the space on disk. But I think that’s some macOS logical volume and/or APFS shenanigans.
Rsync.net and Borg Base provide online storage for borg backup and I’ve had good experiences with both but they aren’t as cheap per GB as Backblaze B2. We also use Backblaze’s personal service for my non-technical spouse’s laptop as their client works on Windows and is easier for the not-so-technically-inclined to navigate and use.
Veeam is on the list as well. It’s closed source but free to use.
