Jason2357

Everybody tests their backups. Some people even manage to test their backups before they need them.

Yes. Choose those only for temporary projects.

Most of those free dns settups use subdomains already. Unless you cant, for a temporary domain name, I recommend just creating an account at a mainstream/reputable dns provider and buying whatever is on sale for a dollar or two per year. Dont plan on renewing because those ones shoot up.

Hopefully the .self tld becomes a thing because it is supposed to be free: hccf.onmy.cloud/…/reclaiming-our-digital-selves-h…

Its about balancing your priorities for availability with recouverability. A business loses a lot more money than I do over a couple days downtime.

Mirrored drives are not backup drives, and vice versa. Though ZFS can definitely start to blur the distinction with automated snapshots and especially offsite mirrors.

Ram is expensive… so all my 24x7 things are containers (docker compose) or FreeBSD jails.

Restic’s dedupe is very good. I used to take uncompressed tars of whole systems and it would add only megabytes to the storage repo each time. Almost everything got deduped despite being in various tar files and very fast.

Thanks. I have spent the day reading about M-disc and optical formats. Lemmy is great for starting rabbit holes! I think I may swap a blu-ray burner into one of my machines and I am actually thinking dual layer blu ray is a decent trade-off: simmiliar chemistry to m-disc (unlike the clear superiority of m disc over DVDs -which I was literally burned on the other week with some yellowed DVDs), and yet still cheap, reasonable amount of disc shuffling, and in the future, nearly any blu ray drive will work with the 50gb discs (unlike 100gb disks). Still might grab a blu ray m disc burner if I see a good deal but they seem rarer than a hens tooth. Lol.

I have less than a TB of truly irreplacable stuff, so 20 discs isnt bad to suffle, and aiming for maybe 20 years of electrically safe cold storage* zero maintenance off-site seems pretty reasonable for a $50 drive and about that in discs.

*This is overkill anyway - already have zfs snapshots going to an external drive in another room and restic backups to b2. But the threat model is some combination of losing b2 (credit card fail or my own incompetence) plus housefire/robbery/electrical surge taking out everything. Also, if I get hit by a bus and my CC is cancelled, a box of transparrently readable discs are significantly safer bet for my survivors than my note about how to get the data off the NAS/backup drive. They could leave it 5+ years and come back to it no problem.

I have wondered about how to manage a 100 spool of DVDs as long term cold storage of the most important data. Would need some way of splitting the data up automatically and building a straightforward burning workflow, with redundancy incase a disk is destroyed, and a way to find a given file.

Seems like a lot of work for 400-ish Gb, but 1. Its very cheap, 2. Archival disks could last a lot longer in cold storage than anything else affordable, and 3. Anyone could recover it in the future because DVD drives have been manufactured by the billion and are still being put in some office PCs. 100gb blurays are also an option but that means sourcing a burner and at least a few drives capable of reading them to store alongside.

I just restored from some 20 year old dvds and they had visible yellowing at the edges and lost data at the end. A few videos were unrecouverable, not many.

Use a gell cell lead acid battery (the kind that go in regular UPSs). No fire hazzard, ans bonus, they can survive freezing temperatures just fine if outdoors. Downside is replacing a cheap battery every 3 years.

Oh neat. I was scared off by OIC going to a data “blob” backend store. I want my files still accessible directly if the database blows up. Looks like opencloud gives you the choice: nexus.opencloud.community/…/storage-backends/

Relaying gigabytes of traffic per user costs serious money. Rely on them to do it, and they are either going to charge you or are just waiting to charge you when their VCs come knocking.