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Comment by zellyn | Hacker News Reader

For those of you wondering whether this is worth supporting, the answer is Yes.

I work with a lot of smart engineers, and periodically ask them what they do for personal backup of images, video, etc. I don't think I've yet talked to someone who was satisfied with their system.

Git annex (with the assistant) brings me closer to my ideal system than I've been before: a drive at home, one in my desk drawer at work for fire-proof backups, easy automatic shuttling of data between them using my phone or USB sticks, and pluggable cloud storage if I decide I want it.

Oh, and a friendly, responsive and excellent developer behind it, developing software in a cabin, in the woods. :-)

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Time Machine to a local drive for immediate restores. Backblaze for disaster recovery.

Time Machine could easily be replaced by cron and tar or some other local backup option. Other backup providers are easily found.

This is not to say anything about git-annex's usefulness or the value of supporting the developer. It just surprises me when engineers are still struggling with backups. I can kind of understand "regular folk", but that's not really the git-annex market, either.

Can you use Time Machine to shuttle data via a USB stick? How well does it work when you have more than two drives that you want to keep mostly synchronized?

Time Machine does the one thing it does really well, which is incremental, local (or network-local) backups and easy restores.

It's not for snapshotting or mirroring. I used to use CarbonCopyCloner to clone my boot drive to an external USB drive every morning at ~4am, so if the internal drive on my iMac died I had an immediate bootable replacement.

(And when the internal drive DID die, I just rebooted the machine and took nearly a year to get around to replacing the internal drive!)

As I understand it, HFS+ can silently corrupt your data; so, Time Machine could potentially propagate that "corrupt" data all the way through your backup disks (and possibly wipe out older, "correct" data!)

We need integrity checking both at file-system level and at backup-solution level. If I'm not mistaken, with Time Machine on an HFS+ volume, we don't have the former, and the latter is file-based and not block-based (making it not very efficient, space-wise).

> I can kind of understand "regular folk", but that's not really the git-annex market, either.

I haven't used it yet, but the git-annex assistant is trying to target that niche, with a goal of an easy-as-Dropbox user experience that hides the technical aspects of git-annex under the hood: http://git-annex.branchable.com/assistant/

rdiff-backup to coalesce several data sources (hg, databases, email, photos..) on my desktop workstation into one local copy with retention / reverse-incremental consolidation,

rsync to take it to a second box in the house,

rsyncrypto to take it offsite to two separate cheap lowendbox VPSes (was originally rsync'ing a truecrypt container)

I might rearrange a couple of these steps to move the retention stage slightly further away from my main workstation, to better protect against the kind of malware that encrypts all your files and extorts a ransom

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