Today is World Backup Day – a friendly reminder to backup and check restores

Today is World Backup Day – a friendly reminder to backup and check restores(worldbackupday.com)

108 points by sammularczyk 12 years ago | 75 comments

A friendly reminder to everyone. RAID is not backup: http://serverfault.com/questions/2888/why-is-raid-not-a-back...

For your home, consider an offline service such automatically backing up to a NAS as well as an online service such as Crashplan or Backblaze.

dirktheman 12 years ago | |

Crashplan or backblaze are very user-friendly, but rather expensive, too. As a cheaper alternative, you can use Amazon Glacier. It costs mere pennies a month. ($0.18 in my case, where I would spend over $5.00 a month at crashplan/backblaze). However, AWS will charge you a lot more if you ever need to get your data back in a hurry. As a last resort solution (for instance my house burns down and my off-site external harddisk gets stolen) it's excellent, though.

nodata 12 years ago | | |

Crashplan and backblaze are not rather expensive, they're cheap. Five bucks a month and you don't have to do any complicated calculations when you want your data restored.

deanclatworthy 12 years ago | | |

I considered the same thing. But when you are backing up several terabytes of photos and home movies collected over many years the cost of storing them on Glacier isn't as cheap as using the unlimited service of Crashplan or Backblaze ($10 a month vs $5-6 month). Furthermore, Crashplan and Backblaze don't charge you to retrieve your data unlike Glacier, which is where it gets very expensive.

atYevP 12 years ago | |

Yea. Backblaze is pretty rad. I work there. We just got polo shirts today!

jreed91 12 years ago | |

Has anyone created a backup app that interfaces with glacier?

deanclatworthy 12 years ago | | |

Arq works quite nicely with Glacier: http://www.haystacksoftware.com/blog/2012/11/arq-cloud-backu...

derekp7 12 years ago | | |

Does anyone have an open implementation of the glacier api? I'd like to add support for it to my backup tool, but I don't want to have to take on the financial risk of a large bill from Amazon if I happen to mis-use the api. So I'd like to try it out on a local server first, to project what the cost would be after a few months of use.

eps 12 years ago |

Did you mean

  Today is a made-up day to drive traffic to
  our highly prized Sponsors and Offers page

  That also used to be one Reddit's feel-good
  community projects until guy in charge filed
  for copyright and grabbed it all to himself.

? Yes, it's an excellent and widely recongnized holiday.

sammularczyk 12 years ago | |

Check the site. No sponsors/offers this year and we've taken steps to avoid what happened last time - our brand/logo is released under a loose Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs, and the content on the site is pretty much all Creative Commons.

We've got the Attribution/NonCommercial stuff in the logo license to protect against sites implying that we approve of what they're selling. We just want businesses using the logo FOR PROFIT to state that we don't endorse or promote their product. Everything else is free reign!

We definitely never intended to trademark/restrict the use of the term. We just got a bit over-enthusiastic with the legal side of things - now we're trying to put trust in the community instead (which, admittedly, should have happened in the first place).

If none of this makes sense, I'd be happy to explain it further

qwerta 12 years ago | |

I think in this case it is more important they remind people of an important issue. Most people do not have any sort of backups.

nanch 12 years ago | |

It looks like the WBD website got rid of the 'deals' page this year.

If you're not a fan of the trademark on World Backup Day™, we have another trademark-free event called Backup Week. :)

https://backupweek.com/the-road-to-backup-week

World Backup Day™ does not endorse and is not associated with Backup Awareness Week

abcd_f 12 years ago | | |

You are exactly the same, except you call it the "Deals $" page.

amirmc 12 years ago |

Please also remember that a backup is only as good as the restore process. If you've never had cause to test that your restore process works as intended then you're still vulnerable.

PS: I admit that while I keep backups, I've not once checked that I can actually restore (but I know I should). I suspect many people are the same.

hugs 12 years ago | |

This is why I make bootable backup copies of my laptop's internal hard drive to external USB drives. Right after the backup is done, I test it by booting from the USB drive to make sure everything worked. (I use Carbon Copy Cloner. I have no affiliation with them other than liking their product.)

elorant 12 years ago |

I had a conversation the other day with a bunch of wedding photographers and it’s amazing how much money they spend on a yearly basis on backup. They all shoot raw and they end up with something like 50-60GB of data per event. And that’s only for photographers, videographers are on a completely different scale.

Now, their number one problem isn’t storage per se, since cost per TB is constantly dropping, but uploading data to the cloud. It takes them anything from days to a full week to upload data.

So here’s my $64.000 question. Why hasn’t anyone tried to disrupt this industry? How about setting up a cloud backup company that sends you a portable disk where you write your data and then send it back. From my understanding money isn’t an issue, they would gladly pay tens of dollars on a monthly fee if someone could handle all their backup issues for them.

actionscripted 12 years ago | |

Crash Plan already offers this: http://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/Latest/Backup/Seeded_Bac...

As I believe many larger backup services do nowadays.

andrewryno 12 years ago | |

At least some large cloud storage providers offer it. For example, AWS has Import/Export[0] and Google has Offline Disk Import for Google Cloud Storage[1].

[0] http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/

[1] https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/early-access

elorant 12 years ago | | |

Oh nice, I didn't know that. Thanks a million :)

qwerta 12 years ago |

Lets talk about something exiting for a change, what is your personal backup policy? Here is mine:

- I backup my online accounts every two weeks. Google has full export including GMail: https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1045788?hl=en . For some websites I use scripts to do website mirroring.

- I make full phone backup every two weeks

- I have incremental daily backups inside computer. So I have daily snapshots of my data for past 5 months.

- I have two USB harddrives, I make full backup 2x a week, every time on different USB hdd.

- online store where I backup every week (slow internet connection)

- and there is a physical off-site backup I do once a month

mercurial 12 years ago | |

I have a terrible backup policy, where everybody's computer is backed up every monday morning on a local server using rsnapshot. I'm thinking regularly of find some decent online backup service which is amenable to receiving VM snapshots regularly before getting distracted and forgetting about it.

ciniglio 12 years ago | |

Do you do anything to check against corruption (e.g. bit flipping)? I've been experimenting with md5deep recently to accomplish this, but it's a little time-consuming. I'd be very interested in hearing about more efficient ways of dealing with this problem.

qwerta 12 years ago | | |

No, except daily snapshots. If I would find main version corrupted I can always recover old version a few month back. I

I found bit flipping problematic only when transferring larger amount of data over network.

IgorPartola 12 years ago | | |

Just use ZFS. It works.

hbarnwheeler 12 years ago | | |

Using Windows? Try ExactFile

Kiro 12 years ago | |

Nothing. I don't have any digital assets I care about.

icebraining 12 years ago | | |

I find that surprising. Even if you don't have anything unrecoverable, like personal photos and such, just having to reinstall and reconfigure everything from scratch is more than enough reason for me to backup stuff up. Especially since I know I won't remember half of it.

mhurron 12 years ago | |

What's a backup?

ryandrake 12 years ago |

Funny timing. Had a near-panic last night where I almost had to tell my wife I lost the last 2 years worth of photos because backups are stale. Fortunately, they were all found on an old laptop, so disaster averted.

I spent last night looking into off-site backup solutions, and haven't yet found one I would be willing to pay for. They all seem to require strange client software to work. Is there anything out there where I can set up an account and simply have cron rsync everything over every week? Why do I need a Java GUI (Crashplan) or some 3rd party python script (Glacier) to do a task that doesn't change week to week?

mey 12 years ago | |

Not sure if you consider Tarsnap to be a "strange client"

https://www.tarsnap.com/

otibom 12 years ago | |

https://backupsy.com/ ?

izzydata 12 years ago |

I can't afford 10 more terabytes of space to create a backup right now. Guess I'll just pick 50gb of non video content to back up.

Also what is the basis for the claim that 33% of people have never backed up anything? It seems like it would be far higher than that, but I'm not really sure what they consider having done a backup. Copying a picture off your camera to your computer might be considered a backup to them.

Kluny 12 years ago | |

Not to mention, "29% of all disasters are caused by accidents". What on earth are the rest caused by? I'm sure a few are caused by malice, but I strongly doubt that it's 61%.

Thrymr 12 years ago | | |

I read the icon to mean 29% of data loss is caused by human error, as opposed to hardware failure, etc. How that's measured, I have no idea (the citation is "Safeware, 2001" for what it's worth).

jlgaddis 12 years ago | | |

What about the other 10%? =)

BorisMelnik 12 years ago |

My personal backup plan for family photos and non-work stuff:

Keep 2 copies on 2 external HD's. 1 gets backed up twice a year and put into a safe deposit box at the bank. One gets backed up once a month and put stored in filing cabinet in our house. I will also make backups onto DVD occasionally.

In addition to these local backups, I run a daily job to backup to an FTP & dropbox.

nodata 12 years ago |

Where are the offers? Show us the offers!

Edit: SpiderOak has unlimited storage: https://spideroak.com/blog/20140327085145-spideroak-offers-u...

nanch 12 years ago | |

Here are some offers: https://backupweek.com/deals

Edit for completeness: CrashPlan https://www.code42.com/store/#/?d=GET_BACKUP_WBD2014

chimeracoder 12 years ago |

I wish that they included options for Linux too.

What Linux backup tools do people use? Currently I'm making do with a bash script that's just a wrapper around rsync, but it'd be nice to have something a little more powerful, especially with the option to back up things to glacier, etc.

andmarios 12 years ago |

Not sure why but this site makes my GPU and a couple of CPU cores working at a full load. I use Chrome 34.0.x.

sammularczyk 12 years ago | |

Hm, really? No such issues here. Could it the transform-3D SVG animation on page load?

andmarios 12 years ago | | |

I am not sure. I am on Linux and nvidia binary drivers. I have seen a fair share of problems, especially webgl based pages eating away CPU, or new tabs eating CPU cycles until they become active for the first time.

This is the first time though I believe that I saw a site eating GPU cycles and this is why I mentioned it.

Executor 12 years ago |

Self-hosted, privacy-friendly alternative: BTSync. Enough said.

talles 12 years ago |

What a gorgeous site