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I would have posted this in our Discord server but mine has crashed on my desktop and won't come back.
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/05/18/1842259/how-an-unprecedented-google-cloud-event-wiped-out-a-major-customers-accountAsk Jennifer Lawrence how safe it is 🤪. Disk storage is so cheap these days I'd just store stuff locally.
I don't pay attention to people who think they're important and a search didn't show anything of note. What please, happened to her?
When I was still working our IT folks had tons of servers for stuff and I learned a lot from them. All my really important stuff is kept on three different portable drives scattered around the house. I have an old transmission in the garage that's been gutted and cleaned out. It looks like an old worthless piece of junk in the corner but has plenty of room for drives. It takes several minutes to unbolt the top which will deter anyone..even me sometimes.
@Ethiopia - Lawrence was one of the victims of the 2014 celebrity nude photo leak, in which private nude pictures and videos of her were hacked via a breach of Apple's cloud service.
This, among other reasons, is why I oppose mandated age verification systems for porn. All it does is provide hackers another database to hack and use for blackmail. History has shown that no cloud-based service is immune from data loss or hacking.@frank22, thanks for the info. I seem to remember hearing about that but didn't pay much attention.
I can buy a pair of 8TB disks for a couple hundred bucks USD, and 4TB external drives for dirt cheap.
My backup server is a Raspberry Pi and a pair of external 8TB drives. On each desktop, laptop, and tablet, I network share the vital directories that I need backed up (shared locally over the home network.) On the Raspberry Pi, I have these shares mounted as if they were local directories. Then, I use scheduled (cron) jobs for each of those directories that run a file copy command, making a copy of each directory to each of the 8TB disks, making two copies on the server. It does this automatically every night. On my desktop, I use Windows Scheduled Tasks to do the same thing onto a USB disk drive of its own.
I check once in awhile to make sure nothing dumb happened, but the gist of it is that I have at least three good copies of everything that I consider important, across two separate physical computers.
Yes, it costs a little money (the price of my time, two disk drives, and a cheap $100 USD Raspberry Pi kit), but I don't pay a subscription, and my vital data stays with me.
I ran into that article a couple of days ago, reminded me why I've never used a cloud service for anything.
This started as just off-site backups in case of fire, flood, tornadoes, etc., then morphed into 'cloud' services as server farms were used to create and exploit a new 'market'.
Eventually, computers will just be 'dumb terminals' on a cloud network controlled by big corps, who will scrape all user-data for AI.
Which is another good reason to keep all your data 'local'.
Ironically enough, I only store volatile and unimportant data online (like my shares here).
All my important things are local only : 2 separate Synology servers, one at home with 4 6TB drives and another one at work with the same config. Auto sync at home, night transfer to the secondary server.That's only two copies if you exclude the data on the live computers but hey, at least I have one off-site.
"..at least I have one off-site."
Yep that's a good idea in case your house burns down. Then again, if that happens losing data would the least of your problems.Is the shelf life of a HDD drive 6 years? If the hard drive is accidentally damaged, the data can still be retrieved.
I buy 1 new HD per year, around 100/150 euros.
It is always bigger, i copy the contence of last years disk to the new one, and put the "old" disk away. I agree i can loose up to a years worth of data, but the chance of a new disk dying within the year, I am willing to take.
after two years I erase the "first" HD's data and use it again to download or store less vital shit.( Been messingg with Ai for fun, but it does produce a lot of images. And ofcourse I forget to clean does folders)An HDD can last at least 3-4 years, but a decent (and not gray-market) HDD (or better, SSD) can theoretically last well over a decade or more with no issues. I have an old Mac with an SSD in it that I bought in 2015, and it still works perfectly alongside the HDD it came with.
The trick is to keep climate control reasonable - a cool (not cold), dry place, and let them sit undisturbed - perhaps dust them off once in awhile.
It's also why you want multiple copies (RAID mirroring works, but also on two different computers). This way if one HDD dies, you can replace it, and copy data onto it from another drive.
Two things to keep it somewhat secure:
1. Be sure that your backup device pulls data from your active computers, and never push data from anywhere to the backup computer/server - for any reason. That way, you prevent a malware-infected active computer from pushing infected data to your backup disks.
2. Have the backup server pull once every couple of days or so, but no more frequent than that! This way, you might lose a day or two of data, but if your working computer gets malware that corrupts its data, you have a day or two to stop the backup server from pulling corrupted data.
Finally, If you worry about fire or flood make the backup server small and portable so you can grab it on your way out, or if you can, keep it in a discreet but secure place outside the house, like in the loft of a separate garage or lockable shed.
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