back to article Blimey, did you know? It's World Backup Day. But... surely every day is world backup day?

Today, March 31, is supposed to be World Backup Day. Where did that one come from? Isn't every day a backup day? We did a bit of poking around. There is a World Backup Day website. Its legal section states: "World Backup Day and the Globe and Arrow are registered trademarks of 614a ltd." A check on this organization reveals a …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I'm guessing world back up day is always near Easter so you can resurrect your data and lets be honest if it's going to die it's usually a Friday leaving you working till Sunday.

    1. Nick Kew
      Coat

      Et resurrexit tertia die, secundum TFM.

      Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum.

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. @YevP

      Yev from Backblaze here -> It's always on March 31st so you can "back up your data and not be an April Fool". ;-)

    3. macjules

      Would not that be the other way round? The machine died on the Friday and the backup did not kick in until Sunday?

  2. Nick Kew
    Trollface

    Yep. Definitely, do it once a year, and make a big fuss of it.

    After all, if you do it every day or week, you'll be re-using your backup tapes[1]. If it takes a while to spot the malware, it might have infected the backups, too, and you'll spend the next year working through them to find the most recent clean one.

    [1] Or substitute your choice of more modern media.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Even at home

    Consumers often buy one (1) big disk to stick all the crud on like photos, and then forget that if that dies, it's all gone so that's an issue I tend to fix first when I help someone (not fun with USB 2 connected drives).

    In addition, I wish all designery types who place harddisks upright so they can fall over when spinning a combination of extreme diarrhoea and a strong cough for their efforts, and no food for a week other than mashed Wikipedia pages describing what a head crash is. What lies down can no longer fall - stick with that.

    I always run two backups. One is a bare metal restore (i.e. I can cold boot from it and use to restore or even work from that disk instead), and one rsyncs important parts of my harddisk to a local USB drive and once a week via SSH to my personal server (which doesn't do anything else like web serving to keep a low attack surface).

    Why two? Just because it's no more hassle than one (it happens overnight) and I value my data..

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Even at home

      I use several backup methods at home, rsync to external drive, rsync to NAS and Carbonite online.

      I've always preached to my extended family that backups are important, explained the 3-2-1 rule etc.

      Then, step-daughter is in college, has all her work on her MacBook Pro (2009 model). A month ago, she threw her thermo cup in her bag, along with her Mac and forgot to close the cup first... By the time she got home, her Mac was swimming in luke warm brew...

      Wails, cries of anguish... I asked, what the problem was, I had given her a terrabyte of cloud storage and set up Office to save on OneDrive and she had several USB sticks. She didn't want "everybody" to see her work, so she had disabled OneDrive and the USB port wasn't working properly and she couldn't save to USB, so no backup! Just music and videos synced with an iPad.

      I tried to rescue the drive, but it had ODed on caffeine.

      She now has a new MacBook Pro (what a piece of junk!) and I installed Carbonite on it as admin and she can't turn it off!

      1. Nick Kew

        Re: Even at home

        Then, step-daughter is in college, has all her work on her MacBook Pro (2009 model).

        Colleague was carrying macbook in his backpack one evening, when he fell into the harbour (this was Amsterdam). Painstakingly dried it and ridded it of as much salt as possible. And lo, it worked. Only thing to have died was the backlight to the screen.

        Those macbooks are robust!

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Even at home

          Not when you can't remove the battery and the user tries to charge it and turn it on, until it goes bang, before consulting a professional... :(

      2. This post has been deleted by its author

  4. Alan J. Wylie

    Cheap USB flash sticks

    As well as a couple of on-line backups of my data, for several years I've carried a LUKS encrypted 64GB USB flash stick around with me. New photos have caused the amount of data to grow, so I recently bought a 128GB drive. It encrypted OK, then formatted as ext4, and the rsync worked OK for a while, then it started throwing errors and became unusable.

    I can only assume that recent cheap USB sticks concentrate the wear levelling of erase blocks in the areas used by the FAT, and having file metadata stored anywhere else, as any other filesystem format will do, will cause rapid damage.

    A quick google later, I've just found this site: How to Damage a FLASH Storage Device which confirms my suspicions.

  5. ServerSauna

    I propose we verify by resetting the world to last year's backup and try and correct the errors

    1. monty75

      Beat me to it. A pre-Trump, pre-Brexit backup would be great.

      1. Rich 11

        But would we learn from our mistakes, or would we be condemned to repeat them?

        1. Mark 85

          But would we learn from our mistakes, or would we be condemned to repeat them?

          If it's a Grouindhog Day type of do-over, it would keep repeating until we get it right.

  6. John 110
    Mushroom

    If

    If it's World Backup day, then surely we should be making arrangements to store some of the Human Race and associated support network off-planet so we can reinstall in the event of catastrophic failure...

  7. MOV r0,r0

    Those two types of disk drive: failed and ones that have yet to fail.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

  8. Wensleydale Cheese

    Production data in test/dev?

    "Companies need to put their data to work by leveraging backup copies to serve a range of secondary storage workloads including test/dev, file services and analytics."

    That depends very much on the nature of your business.

    Any company holding confidential data on their productions systems should NOT be using this data for test and development systems. Financial, medical, legal and good old business confidential data should stay in production-only environments.

    Yes, production data is often the only data that will reveal certain bugs, but you really need to anonymise confidential production data for this kind of task.

    And anonymising data is a lot harder than most people think.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Production data in test/dev?

      Also, let devs erase or corrupt your backups... <G> Anyway, standby data are not backups - they're just a copy to take over if the primary one fails (you can still use that for reports/analytic, if acceptable).

      A test/dev copy is just again a copy for that specific task - so you can modify and restore it at will.

      Backups have to be managed as backups.

      1. Wensleydale Cheese

        Re: Production data in test/dev?

        "Also, let devs erase or corrupt your backups..."

        One that hit the headlines (you would recognise the name) circa 2000.

        A copy of production data was used for testing but it wasn't firewalled off, and stale data went into the production system...

        I gather it took some unravelling.

  9. Martin an gof Silver badge

    Anyone else think the ending of "Inside Out" was just plain wrong?

    investing in ever-greater storage capacity is not the answer. Recent research found that 41 per cent of files hadn't been modified in the past three years. [in other words, this is] stale, redundant data.

    [...]

    ...determine what is business critical before backing it up, while deleting data that doesn't drive business value.

    Just because something is a few years old and hasn't been touched doesn't mean it isn't valuable (or will be in the future) or is in some way "stale" and can be chucked. We have a similar situation at work to that I have at home - the bulk of my storage at home is what I term our "media archive". Just because baby photos of my child haven't been "modified" in fifteen years emphatically does not mean they are lacking in value. Likewise I am definitely not throwing out the hundreds of slides and negatives my parents and grandparents have created over the years.

    Look where wiping "stale, redundant" videotapes got the BBC.

    This is interesting too.

    And for an absolute hero in the field, you need look no further than Richard Russell.

    M.

    Mind you, I daren't venture into my attic these days...

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Windows

    I back up at least twice a day.

    Mainly because my drive isnt big enough to turn the car around.

  11. naufalvitalitas

    Nice for sharing...

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