“There are two types of people in this world. People who have never lost data, and people who will never lose data again.”
– anon.
“There are two types of people in this world. People who have never lost data, and people who will never lose data again.”Which category do you fall into? I suppose there is some mythical group of people who’ve been conscientious from the start but most of us have tripped up at some point and accidentally deleted something or been the victim of some kind of hardware or software failure. Realizing that data is gone – really gone, with no hope of recovery – is a horrible feeling. Either you’re facing time and effort to recreate what’s missing, or you’ve lost something that is irreplaceable like a photo or important document.
Alas, data loss is not uncommon in the Low End space. This could be due to fire (looking at you, OVH), the data center cancelling the wrong server or a whole provider getting involucrated (hello Hostsolutions.ro).
Today is World Backup Day and it’s all about making sure that never happens to you!
So if you plan on keeping your own data around, you should have a backup in place. If this is a novel concept to you, the official World Backup Day page or this guide with practical steps are good starting points.
For those already having backups in place, it’s just as important to test and monitor them regularly. So this year’s focus will be on verifying existing backups in five easy steps:
- Backups are happening? Be sure your backups are running after updates or configuration changes and have monitoring in place to verify.
- Backups are happening often enough? A backup with stale backup will be less useful. So be sure the frequency of your backup matches data changes.
- Backups contain the expected data? Maybe new folders got added or files are accidentally excluded?
- Backups are independent from the source data? Experience shows that your backups should be as far away from the source machine as possible. If they use the same provider, rack or data center, they may disappear at the same time.
- Backups are safe from modification? The source machine can’t be able to change its own backups. This is the case when using push backups to e.g. FTP storage or object storage without special permissions.
To learn more about each of those possible issues, do check out this more detailed article, written in collaboration with BorgBase, an established place to keep Borg and Restic backups.
They made the process of configuring and monitoring backups as simple as possible and maintain a variety of open source tools and guides for many possible use cases. To celebrate World Backup Day, there are even two coupons: 30% off for new users (WBDX23), or 20% off for existing users (WBDZ23). Jump on these quickly because they’re limited to 50 uses.
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I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.
I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308
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Are backups immune to being changed in any way? It is essential that the source computer be incapable of modifying its own copies of the backups. This is the situation when push backups are used to save data in locations such as FTP storage or object storage that do not need specific permissions.
It’s crucial to prioritize data protection now. Thank you for offering a fantastic discount code, which we can use to back up our data and avoid any data security issues . Let’s all take advantage of this opportunity and secure our valuable information. Keep up the good work.