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Grown men don’t backup, they just cry a lot

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Mat Honan lost all of the data on his iPhone, iPad and his laptop the other day (How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking and Video: Mat Honan Details His Post-Hack Paranoia). And he didn’t have a backup: “Had I been regularly backing up the data on my MacBook, I wouldn’t have had to worry about losing more than a year’s worth of photos, covering the entire lifespan of my daughter, or documents and e-mails that I had stored in no other location.”
The day after, Steve Wozniak warned about cloud services in general (Is Woz Right? Will the Cloud Shift be ‘Horrendous’?), and this inspired a post from Cringely (A belt and suspenders for your cloud storage) which is primarily a post about backing your stuff up, because you can’t necessarily trust the integrity of your data to “the cloud”.

I recently finalised a setup I’m happy will offer me quite a lot of protection. I have now for many years had a home server, in its latest incarnation it is based on Ubuntu Linux. The various laptops in my home synchronise their document libraries with the server every now and then. The hard disks in the server have almost always been in a RAID array. My current server has 4 disks of 2 TB each. The RAID 5 setup I use means that I have 6 TB disk space available out of the 8 TB in the server.

Level 1

That RAID 5 setup is level 1 of my data protection system. I agree with others that protecting your data using RAID cannot replace a backup. If you delete a file from your disk, it is gone, or if a software bug modifies a file RAID will do as it is told and write the changes to the disks. It will however ensure that any data created or modified since my last backup won’t be wiped out by a single disk failure. More importantly, it means I don’t have to rush out to buy a new disk and restore everything the minute a disk fails, I’ve bought myself some time, but that advantage has nothing to do with my data security.

Level 2

of my data protection system are my external hard disks. They regularly back up everything on the online disks, and the backup is quite quick because the data transfer is local. I have a lot of media (movies, photos, music) on those disks, and although I still have the DVD’s and CD’s with the original movies and music they are not really part of my backup strategy, the time it would take to rip all the DVD’s and CD’s again and adding all the right meta data to the music files is prohibitive. So that means I need a lot of external disks. But my digital life would not be ruined if I lost the movies and music. My documents and my photos however, that is another matter, so therefore I have two external disks I alternate with to back up that data. So if we consider a photo that is not extremely new, I have a copy so far in three places; on the server and on two different external disks. But what would happen if my house burned down, all my data would still be gone even though I had a backup.

Level 3

of my data protection system is offline storage. Cringely has a small server under a bed in his mother-in-law’s house. I used to alternate with some external disks I would ask friends if I could store with them, but you end up with external disks that were last backed up ½ a year ago and that just isn’t good enough. So I use Crashplan for my offsite backup. The disadvantage of a cloud backup system is first that it can’t be stand-alone as a backup strategy. That is what Mat Honan discovered. His latest photos were backed up in iCloud. That is what Wozniak’s and Cringely’s comments are all about. But as a level 3, if all else fails, I trust it enough for that. The second disadvantage is speed (at least with my internet bandwidth it is). When I initially installed Crashplan on my server I first had it backup my photos, then my document, then my music, and it is currently backing up my movies. I probably don’t really need to do that, but Crashplan offer unlimited storage so why not. After 7 months, I’ve backed up 1.6 TB to “the cloud”. Another 2.4 TB to go…

All in all, I feel my data is pretty safe from accidental or deliberate deletion, and hard disk failures. Over the years, I’ve reinstalled the operating system on my server(s) a couple of times, so I know I can get my data back from my local backup. I have tried to restore selected files from Crashplan and that works too. I realise that it would take a long time if I ever needed to do a complete restore of my data from Crashplan, but that would only be a requirement in the very worst of cases. In such a case the fact that I even have a backup would be considered a bonus. I do of course hope that in such a case “the cloud” would not let me down.

Am I totally protected against data loss? No, bit rot can still do (and has done) data corruption, but that will be the subject of another post


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