CrashPlan has my data, won't give it back
blog.kamens.usUnfortunately it's easy to forget that what you have is not a backup until you have tested it.
I remember setting up a pair of NASes for a customer, units I hadn't used before. I found that the configuration restore did not work at all and the two built-in backup tools a) would only allow a full restore of any backed-up folder and b) were unconscionably fragile, respectively.
Luckily this was blatant in testing and as the rest of the units' functions worked nicely, I decided not to send them back, and rolled my own backup. Which is tested, and has much better alerting/monitoring.
I decided having terabytes of data backed up in the cloud is just not feasible. So I picked about 300 GB which I _really_ care about and back up that to the cloud.
For the rest I got my NAS, and I live with the fact that if the house burns down well then that data goes out the window.
Just because you can back up everything in the cloud doesn't mean you should.
The thing is, the majority of the stuff in my backup is my family videos and photos, and frankly I don't have the time to curate it well enough to select out which of the videos and photos are "important" enough to back up and which are not. Perhaps when I am retired. ;-) In the meantime, my time is far more valuable than the money I will spend backing up everything into the cloud. And I'll now be switching from CrashPlan to a backup solution I built myself using Rclone and Backblaze B2, so I will be able to ensure end-to-end that it works the way I need it to.
At a certain point, isn't it easier and cheaper to just buy a second hard drive, copy everything over, and ship it to an uncle, or a cousin, or your grandparents?
No. My Rclone / Backblaze B2 backups happen automatically every night. They're plug-and-play. The backup scripts I wrote verify random files automatically in the backup every night, to confirm that I'm actually successfully backing files up and can successfully retrieve them. If there comes a time when I need to restore huge amounts of data from Backblaze and I don't want to wait for it to download, I can take a snapshot and ask them to write it to a hard drive to ship it to me. Until that happens, I don't have to worry about it, and given that they charge $.005 per GB per month, the storage costs are infinitesimal.
Do you have a link to more info on your solution?
Thanks for asking. It's one posting back on my blog from the link at the top of this HN thread. ;-)
https://blog.kamens.us/2017/08/24/backing-up-from-unix-to-ba...