What’s your laptop/desktop backup recommendation for general public, not-highly-technical people who don’t have extreme security needs and just want not to lose their family photos etc?

@jwz @cstross @inthehands you need to take responsibility for your loved ones as well.

My wife lost a year's worth of photos when her iPhone was stolen. I used to have PhotoBackup (rsync-based photo backup app on iOS) handling this for her, but it hasn't been maintained for a while and its cipher set no longer has any compatible with a default OpenSSH installation so they basically failed silently.

I now switched her to the Immich app, but the damage was done. Another lesson learned is to use something like healthchecks.io to alert you if a backup hasn't successfully completed in N days.

@cstross @jwz @inthehands If I had $40k to throw around, I'd have seriously considered buying something like this to keep my whole data archive on my person without breaking my back. I even considered buying multiple highest capacity HDD's, but they're pretty much just sold to datacenter customers directly at this point and I question their survivability given how many pratfalls I've taken over the last year.

https://nimbusdata.com/products/exadrive/

@inthehands It came up recently when Rui Carmo discovered Apple's Time Machine is largely untrustworthy. I'd recommend setting up a NAS appliance and Kopia, Borg or Restic (or if you only care about photos and videos, Immich is an excellent choice) but that probably fails the "non-technical" test, not to mention iOS and Android make it deliberately hard to run backups of your system.

@cstross @jwz @inthehands but aren't SSD’s unrealiable for long-term archiving? i see the SSD as more of a mobile solution with HDs with with the more long term one.

i mean, i have 15 year old HDs still working as archives of old media.

@Infoseepage @jwz @cstross @inthehands I also have two NASes, and since they both run ZFS they can use my zfsvault software to sync deltas with ZFS encryption to a pair of 14TB USB hard drives I rotate weekly to the office.

@inthehands Anything that *you* set up and they never see (unless it's needed).

For the general public, backups are just not a thing they think about. I've pestered my wife enough that she copies important things to a USB stick, but if our house burns down that's all gone.

So if you have a good solution for yourself that you can make invisible to them, go for it.

@blogdiva @cstross @jwz I was part of the team (though not a very important part, tbh) that advised Minnesota Public Radio on a storage format when they were digitizing their audio archives in the late 90s / early 00s. The conclusion our group reached was that •no• workaday digital format is suitable for long-long-term archiving, and by far the best approach is to have a process for copying and recopying it all forward onto new physical media into perpetuity.

@fazalmajid @jwz @cstross @inthehands I personally use Bvckup 2 and run off manual copies to my bank vault drives. I also use it to backup both daily and weekly rotated copies of my user profile folder. I have a strong preference for manually run jobs with fault logging so I can sanity check everything.

@cstross @inthehands @jwz I have family photos on tin-types. No, I have not digitized them, there is no point. I am the last in my family to know who those people were. I just grab all the boxes and stuff them in my car.

@inthehands This might work: Western Digital 2TB, 5TB, 10TB external USB Hard Drive

@blogdiva
You young folk...
Nixon resigned on my 16th birthday.

@cstross @jwz @inthehands

@inthehands I use Idrive, which is platform agnostic and reasonably priced. Easy enough for normal people to set up, just install the app and select the folders to back up, backups are automatic.

@c_merriweather @blogdiva @cstross @jwz @inthehands

I was only a year or so younger. But I was also callow enough to believe there never would have been a worse president in my lifetime than Nixon.

@jackwilliambell @c_merriweather @blogdiva @cstross @jwz
[VOICE FROM THE BACK CORNER]

I was there at the laying of the Earth’s foundation. I marked off its dimensions. I stretched a measuring line across it. I laid its cornerstone; its footings were set on the unsightly part of my backyard, in that bare patch next to the garage where it’s mostly gravel. Steve Wozniak hadn’t even written Breakout yet. You kids, you have no idea.

@NotYourSysadmin @inthehands +1 for Backblaze (for nontechnical user, easiest and most reliable, non-sketchy company…)

@c_merriweather @blogdiva @cstross @jwz @inthehands “birthday presents have never had quite the same flavor since”

@inthehands I’ll likely have folks yelling at me about security issues and such but honestly, whatever is built into your OS is going to be the easiest cloud backup solution for a nontechnical user as it’s already integrated with the system you’re using. So iCloud on a Mac or OneDrive on Windows. They’re not perfect but they’re easy and if the person isn’t technical then they likely don’t have to worry about finding the random locations that more technical folks might squirrel away their files.

For non-cloud, a periodic backup to multiple external storage devices using either Time Machine or Windows Backup. Ideally storing the most recent drive in a safe deposit box so if there’s a house fire your data loss is only to the last backup.

The more secure options like Backblaze and SpiderOak are good options but I’d argue they have enough pitfalls that I wouldn’t want to advise a nontechnical person to use them.

@inthehands @blogdiva @cstross Exactly this. Don't worry about how long your media will last, just assume that it won't, and have a system that tolerates that. When my backup drive fails, I notice immediately and it's a complete non-issue.