A minor heart attack

[DailyDi]

Just accidentally formatted the wrong drive and erased 600 photo sets and videos...... thank God for redundant backups!

[Babygeebee]

Yup been there. As an old IT guy I can't stress enough the importance of a good backup. 

On the lighter side, Mikey, did you experienced what we called the ohno-second? That brief moment in time between hitting enter and realizing you did something wrong? Cheers. 

[DailyDi]

1 minute ago, Babygeebee said:

Yup been there. As an old IT guy I can't stress enough the importance of a good backup. 

On the lighter side, Mikey, did you experienced what we called the ohno-second? That brief moment in time between hitting enter and realizing you did something wrong? Cheers. 

Yep, but it was more of an OhF@#k moment!

[Little Cub Pants]

11 minutes ago, DailyDi said:

Yep, but it was more of an OhF@#k moment!

Well at least you had another backup ready to go, so that's good.?????? It would have been a REAL disaster if you didn't.??

[DailyDi]

3 minutes ago, BabyJeggySpideyBoy said:

Well at least you had another backup ready to go, so that's good.?????? It would have been a REAL disaster if you didn't.??

That's why I have a "Black Box" that has a copy of absolutely everything. And like real Black Boxes, it's bright orange so I remember not to mess with it!

[Lil Leo]

2 hours ago, DailyDi said:

Just accidentally formatted the wrong drive and erased 600 photo sets and videos...... thank God for redundant backups!

Holy poop! Scary!!!

?‍♂️

[kasarberang]

6 hours ago, DailyDi said:

Just accidentally formatted the wrong drive and erased 600 photo sets and videos...... thank God for redundant backups!

I once accidently completely formatted my 2TB Harddrive with absolutely everything important on it. I had no backups, nothing. Thank god HDDs don't actually delete their data right away, they simply mark the zones as "free space" to be written over later. I was able to recover almost everything, with only 1 non-important folder having corrupted data.

This reminds me I need to do a backup project I've been putting off. My goal is to have 1 off-site backup, 1 backup at home and 1 (possibly 2) encrypted backups on servers that I control.

[Crinklz Kat]

Yeah ...  I need to run some backups as well. 

[zzyzx]

Reasons to run multiple disks as ZFS mirrors with auto snapshots turned on, plus an additional automated backup to another disk....  Or some additional backup options....

[DailyDi]

9 hours ago, zzyzx said:

Reasons to run multiple disks as ZFS mirrors with auto snapshots turned on, plus an additional automated backup to another disk....  Or some additional backup options....

I have the black box (a 4tb hard drive) with an RDX tape drive back-up for air-gapped protection against viruses/attacks.

[2sail2]

I gots triple backups.  Unfortunately, recently Amazon is dropping it's drive service, grrr.  Not sure what to do for off site.  Maybe google?

[DailyDi]

I haven’t thought about off site. Don’t really trust the privacy of the cloud. 

[Firefly 35]

6 hours ago, 2sail2 said:

I gots triple backups.  Unfortunately, recently Amazon is dropping it's drive service, grrr.  Not sure what to do for off site.  Maybe google?

A RAID drive might be an option.  It uses a number of flash drives in place of a large single drive so that if one goes bad you only lose what's on that one drive.  And if you have the same data saved to the other flash drives, you don't lose anything.  

[Crinklz Kat]

1 hour ago, Firefly 35 said:

A RAID drive might be an option.  It uses a number of flash drives in place of a large single drive so that if one goes bad you only lose what's on that one drive.  And if you have the same data saved to the other flash drives, you don't lose anything.  

That's not necessarily how it works.  RAID 0 is essentially "JBOD" -- or Just a bunch of disks.  It's the least resilient as it's just an aggregation of all disks in the array, and it's this level where you are guaranteed data loss with a single drive failure.  RAID 1 is mirroring.  You have 2 drives, and a copy of your data on each drive.  But, it's limited to 2 drives.  RAID 5 is an array of 3 or more drives and your data is written across all of the drives in parallel.  It includes a check drive, so if one drive fails, the data can be reconstructed. So, let's say you had 3 1TB drives, you only get 2TB of storage from it.  1 drive fails and it's still fully operational.  It's if 2 drives fail that you could be in deep trouble.  That is unless you have hot spares or a mirrored RAID.  RAID level 10 is basically 2 RAID 5 arrays mirrored - so you use twice the # of disks - in the example above, 6 1 TB drives would equate to only 2TB usable storage.   So -- it gets expensive really fast!

I have a QNAP NAS to run my Plex media server.  Has 8 drive bays.  I currently have 6 of them loaded with 10TB drives in a RAID 5 array with 1 hot spare, so I only have about 40TB actual space.  I can lose 2 drives (hopefully I will catch it before a 2nd fails and have already replaced the faulty one).  But there's no simple way to back all of that up - and cloud is simply not an option, not with that quantity of data.  As it's just the rips of all of my CDs, DVDs, and Blu Ray discs, it could be reconstructed in the event of a disaster (provided my original media wasn't destroyed either), but it would take a very long time. 

It's my home file/web server that I'm more concerned about and I haven't done a proper backup on it in far too long.  Fortunately, It's nowhere near as large and I could use a USB external hard drive to offload that data, then stash it somewhere safe.   So why haven't I already done that? ?

[bottlestop]

@Crinklekatz - back in the day when I worked in healthcare, the electronic medical database was huge.  We had three mirrors.  A script quiets the mirroring, then breaks off the active mirror and attaches the inactive mirror and starts the sync to match them up.  Meanwhile the recently detached mirror array is backed up to tape.  While not foolproof, it allowed for disaster recovery via tape - and limited data loss live.  I do not miss those days, retirement is great.