Unfortunately to do backups i need the money to buy a drive to do backups on; most of my pcs are literally made out of scrap parts from broken machines.
I’m trying to do that; but all of the newer drives i have are being used in machines, while the ones that arent connected to anything are old 80gb ide drives, so they aren’t really practical to backup 1tb of data on.
For the most part i prevented myself from doing the same mistake again by adding a 1gb swap partition at the beginning of the disk, so it doesn’t immediatly kill the partition if i mess up again.
I’m trying to do that; but all of the newer drives i have are being used in machines, while the ones that arent connected to anything are old 80gb ide drives, so they aren’t really practical to backup 1tb of data on.
It’s possible to make that work; through discipline and mechanism.
You’d need like 12 of them but if you’d carve your data into <80GB chunks, you could store every chunk onto a separate scrap drive and thereby back up 1TB of data.
Individual files >80GB are a bit more tricky but can also be handled by splitting them into parts.
What such a system requires is rigorous documentation where stuff is; an index. I use git-annex for this purpose which comes with many mechanisms to aid this sort of setup but it’s quite a beast in terms of complexity. You could do every important thing it does manually without unreasonable effort through discipline.
For the most part i prevented myself from doing the same mistake again by adding a 1gb swap partition at the beginning of the disk, so it doesn’t immediatly kill the partition if i mess up again.
Another good practice is to attempt any changes on a test model. You’d create a sparse test image (truncate -s 1TB disk.img), mount via loopback and apply the same partition and filesystem layout that your actual disk has. Then you first attempt any changes you plan to do on that loopback device and then verify its filesystems still work.
The problem is that i didn’t mean to write to the hdd, but to a usb stick; i typed the wrong letter out of habit from the old pc.
As for the hard drives, I’m already trying to do that, for bigger files i just break them up with split. I’m just waiting until i have enough disks to do that.
The problem is that i didn’t mean to write to the hdd, but to a usb stick; i typed the wrong letter out of habit from the old pc.
For that issue, I recommend never using unstable device names and always using /dev/disk/by-id/.
As for the hard drives, I’m already trying to do that, for bigger files i just break them up with split. I’m just waiting until i have enough disks to do that.
I’d highly recommend to start backing up the most important data ASAP rather than waiting to be able to back up all data.
I’m in a similar boat, but tend to mirror my important files across a lot of my drives. Also, whenever I move hard drives computer to computer, I first look at the drive and copy everything I don’t wanna lose, just in case…
Basically, learned to be careful the hard way a few times lol
You can buy (or get) cheap 1tb ssds or bigger 2tb hdds for sub 100€ where I am from.
Pairing that with extreme conpression from veeam, not installing all programs in C:\ (or whatever system directory for linux) and either doing volume or file level backups should give you plenty of space to do those.
Am I the only one around here who does backups?
Unfortunately to do backups i need the money to buy a drive to do backups on; most of my pcs are literally made out of scrap parts from broken machines.
I use scrapped drives for my cold backups, you can make it work.
Though in case of extreme financial inability, I’d make an exception to the “no backup, no pity” rule ;)
I’m trying to do that; but all of the newer drives i have are being used in machines, while the ones that arent connected to anything are old 80gb ide drives, so they aren’t really practical to backup 1tb of data on.
For the most part i prevented myself from doing the same mistake again by adding a 1gb swap partition at the beginning of the disk, so it doesn’t immediatly kill the partition if i mess up again.
It’s possible to make that work; through discipline and mechanism.
You’d need like 12 of them but if you’d carve your data into <80GB chunks, you could store every chunk onto a separate scrap drive and thereby back up 1TB of data.
Individual files >80GB are a bit more tricky but can also be handled by splitting them into parts.
What such a system requires is rigorous documentation where stuff is; an index. I use git-annex for this purpose which comes with many mechanisms to aid this sort of setup but it’s quite a beast in terms of complexity. You could do every important thing it does manually without unreasonable effort through discipline.
Another good practice is to attempt any changes on a test model. You’d create a sparse test image (
truncate -s 1TB disk.img), mount via loopback and apply the same partition and filesystem layout that your actual disk has. Then you first attempt any changes you plan to do on that loopback device and then verify its filesystems still work.The problem is that i didn’t mean to write to the hdd, but to a usb stick; i typed the wrong letter out of habit from the old pc.
As for the hard drives, I’m already trying to do that, for bigger files i just break them up with split. I’m just waiting until i have enough disks to do that.
For that issue, I recommend never using unstable device names and always using
/dev/disk/by-id/.I’d highly recommend to start backing up the most important data ASAP rather than waiting to be able to back up all data.
I’m in a similar boat, but tend to mirror my important files across a lot of my drives. Also, whenever I move hard drives computer to computer, I first look at the drive and copy everything I don’t wanna lose, just in case… Basically, learned to be careful the hard way a few times lol
You can buy (or get) cheap 1tb ssds or bigger 2tb hdds for sub 100€ where I am from.
Pairing that with extreme conpression from veeam, not installing all programs in C:\ (or whatever system directory for linux) and either doing volume or file level backups should give you plenty of space to do those.
I have plenty of non-critical Linux ISOs that I don’t back up (because that’d be like 12 TB).
But I’d still be pissed if I accidentally wiped them.