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Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

It's also why you need redundancy.

I prefer even more redundancy.

In general, I have 4 copies of any piece of data I care about: the machine, dropbox, backblaze, and a local external hard drive.

If you have multiple backups all on the same format, you only have one backup according to THE rules

I take it you've never written DR bare metal recovery procedures or been in involved in detailed, living business continuity planning.

You have zero backups if they're untested.

If they're tested and separate by vendor and/or distance, if they're in an accessible medium or format, then they are different.

I take it you like to read into people's comments things that aren't there.

Yes redundancy is very important.

I lost a decade of my life data when a main hd failed, and a tb backup drive failed at the same time.

Redundancy can fail.

Yours is the absolutely dumbest comment I've read all year.

On the other hand, if you you forget the password to all 4 copies, redundancy will fail.

Life is lossy

It's really just entropy that you're fighting here.

If a copy is physically protected (probably good to have one that is) then it could potentially be unencrypted. Restic won't let you have unencrypted backups (a reasonable design decision to prevent accidentally unencrypted backups), but Borg will.

I also keep my important passwords written down on a piece of paper in a fire safe. This includes my borg and tarsnap keys.

Encryption is an layer to prevent disclosure in cases where offsite vaulting fails to keep data confidential. Backup passwords can be split amongst trusted individuals (N-person keying) so that no one person can access contents themselves, but there is no point of failure when multiple people with the same part of the password.

No, you haven't demonstrated that redundancy will fail. If all 4 copies had the same password, the password was not redundant, and it is the non-redundant component that failed.

I never said they used the same password. If anything, having 4 different passwords to data you access exceptionally, you’re likely to have a bad time. Do you also store the passwords 4 times in 4 separate places?

I'm pretty sure Google has multiple levels of redundancy and still failed.

Except you're wrong. The client is a SPOF.

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