this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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how do you know if a backup is dead (even if you have multiple copies) (alien.top)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I read many posts talking about importance of having multiple copies. but the problem is, even if you have multiple copies, how do you make sure that EVERY FILE in each copy is good. For instance, imagine you want to view a photo taken a few years ago, when you checkout copy 1 of your backup, you find it already corrupted. Then you turn to copy 2/3, find this photo is good. OK you happily discard copy 1 of backup and keep 2/3. Next day you want to view another photo 2, and find that photo 2 in backup copy 2 is dead but good in copy 3, so you keep copy 3, discard copy 3. Now some day you find something is wrong in copy 3, and you no longer have any copies with everything intact.

Someone may say, when we find that some files for copy 1 are dead, we make a new copy 4 from copy 2 (or 3), but problem is, there are already dead files in this copy 2, so this new copy would not solve the issue above.

Just wonder how do you guys deal with this issue? Any idea would be appreciated.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

if you use real backups, and not just simple copies, then your backup software has verify function. For simple copies you should use hash files or something that can build a hash database and verify it. Btw. you should already use hash checking for live data anyway. For archiving you can create winrar archives with 10% recovery record, so it can self-verify and self-repair easily.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

What do you mean by “real backups”?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

dedicated software that can create verifiable historical backup files. Like Veeam or Macrium, or the new generation like Duplicacy, Arq, Borg, etc. All of them have integrity verification integrated.