GoKawiilBackups aren't simple
See also: John Salvatier’s excellent blog, Reality has a surprising amount of detail
I read a comment somewhere that stuck with me, that went something like this:
“There are two types of people: those who have suffered a catastrophic loss of data, and those who will.”
Trying to find the source for it for this blog, it turned out that every other sysadmin has his rehashed version of the quote, but the gist of it is the same everywhere. Data loss is something that happens more often than we’d hope, and most of us are woefully unprepared for when it hits us (which is almost always at the worst possible time).
I can confirm that I had a similar experience once. When I was little we had pulled all our family photos from our home laptops and PCs onto an external hard drive, in order to free up some space. This worked beautifully until one day my dad wanted to use the drive as storage for our TV set-top box (one of these old things), and was prompted to format the drive. He went ahead with it, and the disk was reformatted. The index of files was deleted, and we were stuck with a nominally empty drive.
It would be easy to blame him for screwing up, but it takes beginning a career in tech to realise that there is a series of errors that lead to this kind of mistake. Firstly, we had put all of our photos in one place and didn’t bother with backups. Secondly, most consumer-facing software usually has bold disclaimers telling you that formatting a disk means losing data (which the set-top box didn’t, terrible UI). Besides, why would you even expect a non-technical person to even have to know any of this?
Thankfully we were able to get the photos restored, and it turned out to be a cheap lesson in handling data. You never keep important things in one place only. There’s about a million things that can go wrong. Your drive could die, it could be stolen, bits could rot in cold storage (hard drives have magnetic particles which can inexplicably shift, and SSDs are made of NAND transistors which leak electricity and over time, corrupt your data).
So our first principle is to have a backup, i.e. a copy of your files someplace else. So far so good.
This doesn’t cover the headaches of what a plugged in drive could do. Ransomware could encrypt your files, and you could do anything from an honest mistake like deleting the wrong file; up to catastrophic mistakes like running a script that overwrites everything with zeroes.
... continue reading