The Tao of Backup | Hacker News Reader

The Tao of Backup

taobackup.com

260 pointsvntok106 comments

    The novice said: "I will save my working files, but not my system and application files, as they can be always be reinstalled from their distribution disks."
    The master made no reply.
    The next day, the novice's disk crashed. Three days later, the novice was still reinstalling software.

If that's your situation, it might be worth backing up applications. However, there are better solutions that make this irrelevant. For instance, using NixOS, you can literally back up a single text file describing your system setup, and you can recreate the system from it automatically in minutes, guaranteed to be bit for bit identical.

In my experience that works in box like 80% of the time. Which is great! But a backup is great in case it doesn’t.

If you are wondering ‘How are you getting that much failure’, it’s because I like to freeze older versions and they often decay for one reason or another (can’t get files for example)

It's not guaranteed to be bit identical (the why of it is a can of worms), but it's identical enough for all practical purposes.

At the same time it is significantly more "hardware-change" resilient, since the same backed up config file (minus perhaps some very system specific lines that you may or may not have) can bring up a functionally equivalent working system on quite distinct other hardware as well.

Tell that to MinIO users, lol.

I typically use restores from backups for my personal computer as opportunities to clean things up.

Reverting to a snapshot is a better approach than using backups. My host machine is clean, as all my work is done in VMs.

Is it possible to do that through Veracity? I don't want to use a non-Veracity based solution when Veracity already supports it.

If your NixOS setup is not hello-world kind of trivial, you typically have sops in it (or another secret management tool) and want to backup your age keys as well. They're necessarily separated from the main config, and in the most typical case located in a 600 file outside the git repo. Forgetting to back it up is a classic NixOS gotcha and also a generalized version of this koan.

> The novice became suspicious and said: "Master, is all this 'Tao of Backup' stuff just so you can sell more copies of Veracity?"

> The master said: "Now you are truly enlightened."

> The master said, "Do not despair, for yesterday I took one of your backup tapes and posted it to my brother in China. He will return it."

The master should not have done this, even by sea mail, for the very first law of backup is: you will only learn to make proper backups after you suffer a catastrophic loss of data.

Protecting the student from this is depriving him of the only true knowledge, the one that is not merely stored in the head, but burned into the skin.

I miss the World Wide Web, man...

Social media cannibalized most of the interesting blogs, and 92% of people no longer have the patience to scroll more than 1/2 a page of text. =3

Hard same.

Perusing small blogs over feeds any day of the week.

For reference: a comprehensive backup + security plan for individuals https://nau.github.io/triplesec/

I have neither a macbook nor an iphone

That is horribly written.

please extend for

* windows * android

* specific applications like

* signal * photos

and son on :D

> Store your Really Important Info in a Google Drive/iCloud synced VeraCrypt volume

There is no way I would entrust Google or Apple with keeping important data. Google being infamous for account issues with absolutely no support and Apple already borked my account in a way that makes my iPad unusable the moment I turn on backup sync.

Haven't seen that in ages and thought it had moved. 20GB tape containing all the corporate goodies. That makes me smile.

The $/TiB storage cost currently creates weird choices in backup media... even making some older media formats economical again. Just finished a consumer storage option survey yesterday.

Even if you account for consumer drive+spare cost, a 8TB HDD is still the best JBOD option. For under several dozen 25GB projects, the BD-R disc drive is currently the cheapest media backup option (about 35% cheaper than HDD above 12TiB). Note 50G and 100G BD EOL media are actually equal to or a worse deal than HDD.

Also, HPE LTO9 18GB Tapes are currently around 5 to 15 times cheaper than HDD and SSD in terms of data storage cost, but the fixed cost of tape auto-loaders and drives don't always make sense until you have a significant amount of backup data. Tapes may also create a single point of failure in use... so incremental backups are a non-zero risk, and triple redundant hardware is required (old hardware gets hard to find.)

The classic joke is still true: "Fast, cheap, or good.. choose any two..."

Best of luck =3

I looked in to the bluray thing and concluded it just doesn't make sense at any level. You have to buy a bluray writer which will become increasingly rare, and then you are limited to 25GB disks where you have to factor in a chunk of that will go unused as each project won't fit on exactly 25gb.

For the effort you are expending, just getting a hard drive makes way more sense even if the $/gb is technically a little worse. The utility of hard drives is much better.

>I looked in to the bluray thing and concluded it just doesn't make sense at any level.

I mostly agree, but the 25GB M-Disc EOL media format is fairly interesting for archival purposes. The gamble actually made sense in this rare instance as each active project folder still fit on one disc, and the $120USD omnidrive firmware drives should keep the retro-equipment running for a few more years. These are relatively inexpensive even with a spare unit in the box.

>just getting a hard drive makes way more sense

In many cases this can be true, but the 3 years of HDD flight time compared to the 7+ year SSD wear life is also fairly close. It is weird, but the cost of higher capacity 18TB/24TB HDD also no longer make sense for JBOD either... unless you are hitting rack space constraints. =3

Blu-ray, or any non-rewritable optical media, guarantees that it hasn't been tampered with. If I were attacked by malware, I like the confidence that the Blu-ray backup is absolutely guaranteed to be the same as on the date it was written. A hard disk used for backup might have been reattached to the network at some point after the initial backup and gotten infected/corrupted/altered.

> Blu-ray, or any non-rewritable optical media, guarantees that it hasn't been tampered with.

In terms of external tampering, I think that need is better-served by encrypting everything, which you probably want to do anyway. Or at least using some sort of checksum signed by a key.

However if the focus is "what if the backup process is compromised", then yes, having some date which is beyond its writing-reach may be useful. Another aspect of this might be a remote-backup system where one set of credential is enough for daily backups and restore, while another is needed in order to access a set of older duplicates that are remotely maintained as ransomware-protection.

That depends on your threat model. If the attacker can swap the Blu-ray disc to a similar looking one, but with content they control, that absolute guarantee becomes moot.

I've been down "LTO at home?" rabbit-hole... I nearly ended up buying a SAS HBA, until I realized that S3 Glacier is tape-as-a-service.

AWS is an option up to 30TiB, but also feeds into the over-provisioned data-center market pressures. The recent "rclone --gui" solution does bestow rsync/sshfs like features for Windows users now, and remote mounts are easier/cleaner to bring up. =3

S3 is too expensive to do a restore from. And you have to restore to verify.

It isn't too expensive for my use case – per month, I retrieve about 500GB a month from Glacier Instant Retrieval to verify, which costs ~$15. Combined with other costs, my monthly bill is ~$50.

I used to use Backblaze B2, which had cheaper egress at the cost of slightly more expensive storage (I think ~$5/TB/mo, with free egress up to 3x all current storage?) So I paid $20. But at some point AWS opened a datacenter near me, and I couldn't ignore how much faster data transfers got.

It's ok when it's 0.5TB but we're at about 900TB.

The point is the cost doesn't scale well.

Depending on the amount of data you have, might it not be less expensive than build the tape drive?

An LTO drive is easily $10.000. You can restore a lot of S3 data for that amount of money. Sadly getting cheaper tape options is not really possible anymore.

I paid < $400 for my LTO5

I assume used. Sadly I'm not really in a market where that type of equipment is widely available second hand.

Yeah used with 1 year warranty.

Ah that sucks :(

>Depending on the amount of data you have, might it not be less expensive than build the tape drive?

Rule #25: Try to avoid making what one may purchase, as the total cost is often many times higher than first assumed.

It is tempting for many, but often doesn't end well for businesses. =3

use cloudflare's r2, no egress fees

Just bought an LTO drive yesterday (after failing to cool its predecessor properly - dont be like me). They got more expensive more or less in line with HDDs :(

Used Tape drives often had the write heads service hours go well past its recommended limits. Mission critical IT systems don't get "upgraded" off schedule very often. ymmv

Anecdotally, I have seen Tape sets fail in production settings, as a remote office location admin was doing incremental backups... and the sick tape drive kept silently damaging each daily roll-back attempt. They may fail ungracefully in an archival context.

I do not deny a janky BD-R drive option is situation specific, but for small projects I am fine with a 25GB disc $25.80/TiB solution with the occasional big file $62.42/TiB hit for 100G/128G EOL discs.

HDD are less hassle, still hit below $34.63/TiB, and last a few years. Not a bad fall back option if you still have old inventory. =3

That should still be the case today.

Other than photos, music and videos, everything I have ever done in the last 40 years is 1.57Gb.

Media is where it got expensive.

Corporate backups include entire VMs, not just files. So you are looking at something that is closer to 40TB than to 40GB.

I just launched a music backup tool and service.

Storage is Hetzner Storage Box which so far feels great. Cheap and supports SSH SFTP WebDAV, so you can use rsync or restic and browse artifacts over www.

It feels a little slow hosting in Germany but using from US. But I haven’t found a provider with the same cost / features.

Any alternatives folks use for backups?

https://deadca7.com/blog/backups

After reading the title, but before visiting the link, thought this was a backup of all of Terrance Taos work.

Not to be confused with the Zen of Backup…

A novice asked the master: “What must I do to learn the Zen of Backup?” The master whacked the novice in the head, grabbed the keyboard, and ran sudo rm -rf /. The novice smiled and left feeling enlightened.

After six years on my old build, last week I built a new computer. One of the things I invested in was treating the backup regime as the most important aspect of the new build. There's a piece of mind one gets from achieving the "seven heads"

And the cautious reader asked:

  Surely it's not a plug for some product ?

/next /next /next ...

  Bah, of course, it is !

And they closed the tab and flagged the submission even though the actual advice was reasonable and the product no longer existed.

To be fair it's a plug from 1997 and the domain has since changed hands

Wow,.. this is so old that they still use the word "Tao" instead of "Dao". Still good advice, too.

Nice Epilogue

I like that the site is simple text (if not plain writing), but even in 1997 this multi-page layout would've a pain to read vs. a single page.

> But the master had already overwritten it with a copy of DOOM.

A master after my own heart.

I read all the steps, but not yet enlightened.

Loss of hard disk is a great way to declutter your system just saying

HTTPS cert is invalid

there is no cert, it's http://

Reply on news.ycombinator.com