this post was submitted on 19 Nov 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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Lost all my data and it's my fault (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I've been "staging" data onto a 12tb external drive for a few months in preparation for building a more robust system. In the back of my mind I knew that if I didn't have a backup of this and something happened all is lost and I was truly an idiot.

Now that I've got the idiocy out of the way, my roommate plugged in the drive as she decided it would be a nice idea to clean up my desk and such. She called me saying she smelled burning plastic and shutdown my systems.

I came home to find the external drive smelling of burnt plastic and my heart sank. It would not power on, I pulled it out of the encloure and connected it to a usb sata cable and power source and it would not come on. So essentially I lost everything.

This is my fault for not having backups and allowing other people to touch my gear. So I've learned my lesson.

I'm working to recover everything that I actually cared about (maybe 2-3tb out of the full disk I cared about).

Moving forward. I don't know that spending 2k on a NAS is going to do me any good as the NAS is not a replacement for backups.

I'm trying to come up with a new system (to me) for backups/archiving.

Here's what I used to have.

1 x external usb drive encrypted with Luks, data within is client-side encrypted with restic for multiple sources. This works fine for me and I've got my restic and luks head keys backed up (like that, huh? lol).

I'm likely going to go with this same method, but I'm thinking this time I'll figure out a way to have a second drive of the same size that either is a restic target so all backups and archives are duplicated as they are archived or figure out a way to do this to where drive A is somehow mirrored to drive B when it's not archiving. I'm not sure if this is possible or the best way to do this.

If you were starting over and had the budget for say 2-3 big external drives what would you recommend?

I know I am also going to be using something like B2 with encryption as a point of last resort backup solution (encrypted client side again). But for now I'm focusing on physical media.

Thanks for your help. I expect to be flamed for this post, but trust me I've learned my lesson and was idiot-taxes

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

As far as backing up your LUKS keys. This may sound low-tech but print a QR code of the keys onto paper and put it with your other important physical documents.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

U have a nice roommate who cleans ur room lol

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

just don't fall into the typical trap:

  1. I am brave, backup is for losers
  2. I lost everything, I must do the perfect backup setup in the world
  3. I still on a way to design my ultimate backup solution
  4. I lost everything again because my amazing multilevel backup setup missed one link and it did nothing for months without realizing that

Just get a simple external drive and use one software that you know well. It means that you previously tested, and you are familiar with its working and recovery methods. Add some monitoring, best if the backup software can send emails.

When you have this base layer, then you can think about extending it to cloud, multiple locations, etc. First just do an easy simple stable reliable solution.

Multiple levels of encryption is useless, it just makes the system more complicated and error-prone. Either trust in the encryption built-in to the backup software, or do not use any application level encryption and use disk-level method.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

At this point just get an external with bit locker as save all your backups. Thats a start. Then redundant storage.

Work on your NAS immediately after.

Get rid of the roommate she’s an OP 🤣

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

At this point just get an external with bit locker as save all your backups. Thats a start. Then redundant storage.

I'm grabbing some easystores now.

Work on your NAS immediately after.

I do like the idea of having 2x2bay Synology NAS so I can do replication. It covers many use-cases without being too complicated.

Get rid of the roommate she’s an OP 🤣

I pay very little rent here, I'll call it a cost of doing life business :-)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I pulled it out of the encloure and connected it to a usb sata cable and power source and it would not come on.

Did you try connecting it directly to SATA? I would trust an ATX PSU and direct SATA connection before calling it dead

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

If there’s anything truly irreplaceable on the drive, it can almost certainly be recovered by data recovery companies. The big ones will charge you upwards of £/$1000, but /r/datarecovery can point you in the direction of smaller (but equally effective) businesses that will charge as low as £/$200 for repairs not requiring platter swaps (there’s good odds that this is the case for you!).

The reputable ones will give you a quote for the cost of shipping. If you can’t afford it right now, keep it in your back pocket for a better time.

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

Is the roommate going to pay for the drive she killed? I’m just curious what happened next.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

My condolences

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

Well, I would say, keep multiple backup copies. An external drive plus cloud like Backblaze B2 which I think is exactly your case in terms of price. Upload encrypted with rclone.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I don't know that spending 2k on a NAS is going to do me any good as the NAS is not a replacement for backups.

This is very true but a NAS still has its place. Using RAID-1 (simple mirroring) protects against any potential catastrophic failure of hardware but does nothing to protect you from a ransomware attack or stupidly deleting the wrong folders. So there is a point to having a NAS but it's not 100% solution on its own.

Relying on cloud storage for backup has its own set of problems. Cost of service, extra charges for retrieving your data when needed, and the extreme time it takes to transfer anything. Depending on the volume of data, it could take weeks to download everything back to your location. Add to that the loss of privacy and the potential for any given provider to go out of business or change their business model with total disregard for their customers and it's not really the best backup solution.

IMHO the way around these limitations is to have a NAS with RAID-1 (for problem set #1) and set up a second NAS either on site or remote and send periodic backups to it using whatever intervals make sense for your case. I do this with my Synology NAS as my primary and an older Terramaster NAS that receives the backups via Rsync. I have total control over what gets backed up and when, and in the event of a total loss of the primary NAS the other one is still available to rebuild from.