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 Or flood. Power loss is fine, water and fire are not.

@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.

@inthehands

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.

@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 …

@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.

@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...

@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.

@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?

@Infoseepage @jwz @inthehands My backups do not plausibly need to survive my and my family's demise in a city-incinerating disaster.

@cstross @jwz @inthehands OMFG WHY DID YOU MAKE ME REALIZE AM ALSO ANCIENT!!!

i turned twentyteen in 1986.

jfc.

@cstross @jwz @inthehands “I don’t have to see it Dottie, I lived it.”

@cstross @jwz @inthehands When I packed my bags a year ago, I did so on the assumption that I might never return to the US again. Throwing a copy into the cloud and having a 8TB NVME feels pretty minimal to me and is ultimately a small portion of my pack-rat data archive which is well about 100+ TB. No real way to run off a mobile copy of that which I could carry around, so I pared it down to mostly my family photo archive (Going back to the 1850's).

@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.