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Comment by bradley13 | Hacker News Reader

More or less the rules that everyone should follow, everywhere. I only somewhat disagree on two points:

(1) Store everything in a cloud, not on the laptop? You've got to work on the stuff, so it needs to be on the laptop. You should have automatic synchronization, and the user shouldn't really have to worry about it.

(2) You shouldn't use a commercial cloud. Hosting your private cloud is incredibly easy (OwnCloud & Co), and whoever is responsible for your IT should ensure that backups happen. Cloud providers don't really provide backups. When iCloud loses your files, good luck with that. Someone accidentally deleted a file some unknown number of weeks ago? If you have your own backup system, finding it is easy. Relying on Google or Dropbox? Maybe you'll find it in the version history (if you have versioning turned on), and maybe not...

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Who on your early-stage team will be running ops and security on your self hosted cloud?

Clearly the ops person?

Small team, though, non-profit. There is wayyyy more work to do than any one individual has time to do, and while this is probably common even in non-startup-y type businesses, it means "work on what matters most" is really important.

I don't believe managing my own cloud is anywhere near the top of my list of things that matter most. We pay something like $8.50 a month to just have the devices backed up using a backup service. It would cost significantly more for me to maintain OwnCloud.

There is no such thing as a team that's too small to make their own backups. :(

I don't think I said we weren't making backups. We have two pieces in place:

1. We are a Microsoft 365 shop, so OneDrive stores versions of files and all that. Admittedly this is not a "backup" necessarily, but it does serve a portion of the purpose of backups and are far more easily accessible to users themselves.

2. We also have a backup service running on every company issued laptop that backs up to a backup service.

What I am not advocating is that a small team should setup their own cloud for the purpose of backups. That's a lot of work and maintenance. I am an IT team of 1. My time is better spent on actually getting work done, not playing around with self hosting stuff and maintaining that.

Backups are important, otherwise I wouldn't be spending thousands of dollars on it in my tiny little budget each year. But I disagree pretty strongly with the priority of _how_ to do backups.

>(1) Store everything in a cloud, not on the laptop?

shouldn't we follow the 3-2-1 backup rule?

"The 3-2-1 backup strategy simply states that you should have 3 copies of your data (your production data and 2 backup copies) on two different media (disk and tape) with one copy off-site for disaster recovery"

Disagree on “host your own”. Use a business cloud instead of a consumer one if you’re worried about reliability of backups.

I’ll use Microsoft as an example since that’s what I’m familiar with:

- Users store personal files in OneDrive (stored on their device, automatically synchronized)

- Shared files in Sharepoint or Azure File Share

- Enable Azure backup of the file share, or use a cloud service that runs Veeam for you (iLand, etc) to backup your Office 365 environment (including Sharepoint and OneDrive)

The founder is the “IT person” usually, and they don’t need to worry about running backups. That’s a recipe for “hey I need this file restored” followed by “oops our backups haven’t run for 9 months” (seen this first hand, far too often).

I've had some solid experience with alcion.ai as a backup tool. Relatively cheap for a early-stage startup and extremely reliable so far (even had to restore some onedrive files).

Don't password managers get hacked all the time lately?

This is really good advice though: "Encrypt your hard drives using FileVault (macOS) or Bitlocker (Windows) and never leave your machine without locking it."

No, there have been only a couple of managers that had significant problems with their implementations. Usually it's a closed source manager that has the undisclosed implementation issues that get exploited.

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