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Word of Warning: Backups (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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After a single APT command gone wrong made my Debian installation unusable, I decided to reinstall Linux. I tried to back up everything to my external hard drive, but it kept unmounting, so I elected to use Filen (a FOSS cloud storage provider) instead.

It was only after installing openSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE Plasma that I realised I hadn't actually synchronised the folder I had moved my backup to; meaning I have lost everything but a single Minecraft world (which I had backed up to a Compact Flash card in February).

Tl;dr: Double check your backups, and use physical storage whenever possible.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sorry about your data loss.

I self host an instance of nextcloud on a headless machine in my home. It gives the benefits of typical cloud based services, but you control the storage. And if you sync with at least one other machine you have a full backup besides.

Of course no solution is perfect. This requires extra time, effort, and hardware. And having my data in one physical location has it's own risks. But I still prefer it.

So, something to consider if you or whoever is reading this isn't aware of that option.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

If you have any friends or family in a nearby town, ask if you can leave an external hard drive at their house. You could make a full disk encrypted backup of your machine every week or so and then when you visit them leave a copy of your backups. It may give you more peace of mind if the data is valuable like journals or family photos.