Comment by andrewmcwatters | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewmcwatters | Hacker News Reader

andrewmcwatters

I remember looking for some saved emails on GMail once only to realize that at some point, emails I tagged as Saved were just gone, missing, one day beyond a particular point in time.

If you don't own your bytes, someone else does, and they can and do go missing. Everyone has to buy some storage sometime. It's super naive to think companies and organizations are "professional" and don't just straight up lose things. It's just life.

Did you know GitHub has an error page for when they cannot retrieve a repository from their database? Yeah, your emails can just go missing. Your repos can just go missing.

I shudder to think someone's deed to their home somewhere out here in the states has at some point in time just straight up gone missing, but I would not be surprised.

There's an accredited university in New York that's closing soon. All of those people's degrees--how will you verify you actually graduated from there? I guess you had better kept copies of your transcripts and your physical diploma.

Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.

First: Friendly reminder to everyone to back up your data and then back up your backups to a separate location.

Second: I’m the person in my family who wakes up in a cold sweat worrying if our photos are backed up properly, or my music collection. I’ve got a handful of backups at the house that I double check periodically to make sure they haven’t decayed, and some stuff backed up to some cloud services. I’ve been talking to some family members and close friends about building some simple home lab raid devices that we can use to back up our stuff locally and to one another’s locations.

I’m not enough of a network engineer or server admin to know the best way to set it up, but I’m hoping we’ll figure out a simple, cost effective way to handle it. I’m hoping it’s a fun project either way and we can all avoid entropy for just a bit longer.

How do you back up emails?

I use google take out to do a dump of email and back up the download file. In order to clear out a bunch of space on my gmail account, I did a full export and then deleted conversations based on date. I ended up having to use a script which ran over a few days, due to limits on how fast I could access messages. This was all to avoid signing up for a paid account.

https://takeout.google.com/

Excellent question and not one I’ve bothered to solve, and you’ve pointed out a gaping hole in my backup plan.

If I had to decide now, I’d say setting up a server that pulls my email in with IMAP and saves it to a backup drive. Of course that means making sure spam and marketing emails I don’t want aren’t backed up, so maybe I mark them somehow as back up targets?

It’s an excellent question and I don’t have a good answer. And it’s worth pointing out that emails are just as important as photos when you think of correspondence from friends, family, business contracts, attachments, links and their contents, etc to forever. The network effect is very real and I’m not sure how to handle all of that.

I like https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap3

I still use POP3 to this day because the very nature of the protocol means I keep local copies of all my emails.

It's still my responsibility to properly backup my local copy of the emails, of course, but that's easy.

I use IMAP to read emails, but back up emails by running tar in my server's /var/mail folder and scping the file to my backup drives.

https://github.com/djipko/gbackup-rs

Produces an SQLite database.

I use mbsync to sync gmail to a mail folder on a local drive, and then backup the mail folder onto a network drive using rsync, and then sync every 24 hrs to a onedrive folder using rclone,

Don't know why everyone doesn't do that!

For point 2, check out synology. I can say my experience has been great and I wish I’d bought a bigger device (I got a four bay enclosure and wish I’d gotten 8). QNap was also a home storage device I looked into, but don’t have any experience with. Not affiliated with synology, just a satisfied customer.

Love my Synology, and I bought a 2-bay cus I thought it was just going to be a toy. Now I have everything on it and I’m dreading moving to a larger unit. It’s backed up nightly to whatever cloud provider I feel like at the moment, but it would be super cool to put a second unit at a friend’s house and back up to that.

Been using a synology since 2017 it's an amazing data storage toaster. Don't ever need to think about it, it just goes and goes

“Toaster” is not the positive adjective that comes to mind when it comes to data.

How much maintenance have you done on a toaster

>There's an accredited university in New York that's closing soon.

Sounds like I'm getting a new degree soon!

Should go well with your work experience at SVB and Lehman.

I think you can still get your enrolment records or verify your degree (which is really the thing that matters): https://www.cazenovia.edu/admissions/enrollment-services/reg...

And a good way to do that is by reigning in the digital clutter.

No you don’t need those 15 shots of literally the same angle. Nope, you don’t! Maybe as a professional photographer but even then you’d mostly know what to discard.

Because if you don’t then cost will not be the only problem. It will be difficult to move around your data and you may have to. You also need to keep multiple copies online — so there as well cost will multiply.

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