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?
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@jwz
Yeah, that’s my exact setup too (except the remote one is more like monthly). It feels like a lot for the tech-phobic who find even a password manager overwhelming, but maybe that’s just a hurdle worth finagling people over.@inthehands @jwz May I ask where the remote one is? Parent's/friend's house? Safe deposit box?
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@jwz
Yeah, that’s my exact setup too (except the remote one is more like monthly). It feels like a lot for the tech-phobic who find even a password manager overwhelming, but maybe that’s just a hurdle worth finagling people over.@inthehands In my humble but correct opinion, they can either get over using external drives, or they can get over losing all of their photos. There's no third choice.
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@inthehands if $50/year is within budget, and they’re not running a minimum spec machine, maybe backblaze.
Continuous, automatic backups. The time-machine style “show me this file / directory from an hour ago or a week ago” is very useful, maybe even more so than the complete system recovery.
@lluad @inthehands just checked and it's $99 for backblaze. Looks good but at that price it's a maybe for me while at $50 I'd have just gone for it
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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?
Maybe it’s just “use the cloud drive,” but…OneDrive seems to cause a lot of problems? or does it?
@inthehands For most non-technical users on Windows or MacOS, definitely Backblaze. Set it and forget it, let it run in the background, restore 30 days' file history if needed.
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@lluad @inthehands just checked and it's $99 for backblaze. Looks good but at that price it's a maybe for me while at $50 I'd have just gone for it
@flexasync Huh, it’s gone up since I last paid attention.
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@inthehands @jwz May I ask where the remote one is? Parent's/friend's house? Safe deposit box?
@theorangetheme @inthehands Anywhere that is not likely to burn down at the same time is fine.
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@inthehands Time Machine on two removable USB drives. One lives in your house and gets connected regularly; one lives somewhere else and you back up to that once or twice a year. All other answers are incorrect.
@jwz @inthehands I use TM on *three* removable USB drives—two SSDs (one to carry outside the house in case of fires) and one spinning rust (for reliability). Also Dropbox for file sync to the spare machine, a hot spare which *also* has two SSDs for Time Machine, but isn't always freshly backed up (or touched) from one week to the next.
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@jwz @inthehands I use TM on *three* removable USB drives—two SSDs (one to carry outside the house in case of fires) and one spinning rust (for reliability). Also Dropbox for file sync to the spare machine, a hot spare which *also* has two SSDs for Time Machine, but isn't always freshly backed up (or touched) from one week to the next.
@cstross @jwz @inthehands is time machine apple only? Or can the plebs parttake in this techomagical marvel?
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@cstross @jwz @inthehands is time machine apple only? Or can the plebs parttake in this techomagical marvel?
@mavu @jwz @inthehands Apple Only. I believe there are third-party equivalents for other OSs.
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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?
Maybe it’s just “use the cloud drive,” but…OneDrive seems to cause a lot of problems? or does it?
@inthehands After years of messing around planning out how to build something myself, my father passed away and I got to be keeper of all photos.
Commercial home Synology NAS, backup of all photo and music, and Backblaze backup of the NAS itself. Which I did test.
Cost a few hundred in hardware, and about $100 a year for backup, if I recall correctly. That was surprisingly cheap.
And then it really just worked.
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@theorangetheme @inthehands Anywhere that is not likely to burn down at the same time is fine.
@jwz Or flood. Power loss is fine, water and fire are not.
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@jwz @inthehands I use TM on *three* removable USB drives—two SSDs (one to carry outside the house in case of fires) and one spinning rust (for reliability). Also Dropbox for file sync to the spare machine, a hot spare which *also* has two SSDs for Time Machine, but isn't always freshly backed up (or touched) from one week to the next.
@cstross @inthehands I know *so* many people whose backup strategy is: I have never taken a photo in my life with something other than an iPhone, so if I ever lose access to my iCloud, everything I've taken since I was a teenager is gone forever.
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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?
Maybe it’s just “use the cloud drive,” but…OneDrive seems to cause a lot of problems? or does it?
Upvote for what jwz & Charles Stross said. More explicitly, if your data is on someone else's computer - and any cloud / remote service definitely counts - you have to treat it as something you could lose access to at any time, without warning and without any way to recover it.
If having data backed up to a cloud drive is convenient, do that - but do not consider it part of your critical backup strategy. For that, you need to own the process and the hardware.
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@cstross @inthehands I know *so* many people whose backup strategy is: I have never taken a photo in my life with something other than an iPhone, so if I ever lose access to my iCloud, everything I've taken since I was a teenager is gone forever.
@jwz @inthehands As I was last plausibly a teenager in late 1984, more than an entire teenage lifespan before the iPhone first appeared, I now feel ancient …
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@cstross @inthehands I know *so* many people whose backup strategy is: I have never taken a photo in my life with something other than an iPhone, so if I ever lose access to my iCloud, everything I've taken since I was a teenager is gone forever.
@jwz @cstross @inthehands I've got two eight drive NAS boxes with redundancy against two simultaneous drive failures, each of which has an independent copy of my family photo collection. I have a HDD kept in an ESD bag which gets run down to the bank every six months or so, an encrypted cloud storage account with multiple copies of my password vault kept synced to multiple devices and a USB stick with same on me at all times.
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@jwz @inthehands As I was last plausibly a teenager in late 1984, more than an entire teenage lifespan before the iPhone first appeared, I now feel ancient …
@cstross @inthehands Not only were almost all of my employees born after @dnalounge opened, but probably most of them were born after I took it over...
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@jwz @cstross @inthehands I've got two eight drive NAS boxes with redundancy against two simultaneous drive failures, each of which has an independent copy of my family photo collection. I have a HDD kept in an ESD bag which gets run down to the bank every six months or so, an encrypted cloud storage account with multiple copies of my password vault kept synced to multiple devices and a USB stick with same on me at all times.
@jwz @cstross @inthehands Since leaving the US a year ago, I've also kept a 8TB NVME drive in an enclosure in my pocket with a copy of my family photo collections on my person in a zippered pocket at all times. I'm backed up/redundant in so many different ways and I STILL feel nervous about loosing all copies.
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@jwz @cstross @inthehands I've got two eight drive NAS boxes with redundancy against two simultaneous drive failures, each of which has an independent copy of my family photo collection. I have a HDD kept in an ESD bag which gets run down to the bank every six months or so, an encrypted cloud storage account with multiple copies of my password vault kept synced to multiple devices and a USB stick with same on me at all times.
@Infoseepage @jwz @inthehands This is what those orbital data centres are for, amirite?
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@Infoseepage @jwz @inthehands This is what those orbital data centres are for, amirite?
@cstross @jwz @inthehands Yes, but what about when the sun explodes? Where is your backup solution then?
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@cstross @jwz @inthehands Yes, but what about when the sun explodes? Where is your backup solution then?
@Infoseepage @jwz @inthehands My backups do not plausibly need to survive my and my family's demise in a city-incinerating disaster.
