NFN Smith wrote:
All good stuff. A couple of additional thoughts inserted...
Paul B. Gallagher wrote:
David E. Ross wrote:
I have files unrelated to SeaMonkey that are no less important. I
do a system-wide backup every week.
In my case, nightly (mission-critical work computer). The first week
I had a computer (a PC-XT in 1985), I lost a whole day's work by
failing to back it up. Ever since, my motto has been, "If you love
me, back me up."
Some basic principles all users should follow for backup (I'm sure
you know this, but other readers may not):
I would go one step further -- think through your potential recovery
scenarios. There's enough variants that one particular backup
methodology or tool may not fit all the possibilities for recovery.
There's a difference between doing a bare-metal recovery following a
device or controller failure and a recovery from an "oops" overwrite or
deletion of one or two critical files.
Good point. An ideal backup system supports both.
1) Do it automatically. If you have to think about it, you'll forget
or make excuses, and when disaster comes you'll lose something
important because you didn't back it up.
2) Separate the backup media from the source computer. If the backup
is killed by the same disaster as the computer, you have no backup.
And don't rely on a single media set that's continuously attached,
although this works against point 1). Now that one of the varieties of
malware that we have to account for includes ransomware, you need to
make sure that you account for the possibility of that kind of thing
encrypting your backups. Plus, there's always the the matter of making
sure you have off-site backups (think: building burning down, or a
lost/stolen laptop).
Yep, that's the point of separation.
There are essentially two approaches to this: backup via the Internet to
a remote site ("the cloud"), or swap the media regularly so the
penultimate one is always off-site.
There are trade-offs here. Backing up to a remote site entails the risk
that someone else may gain access to your data (use hard encryption),
that the remote host may fail (HW crash, etc.) or go out of business,
and that you may lose/forget your password, encryption key, etc. And
swapping the media runs up against points 1) and 3) -- the more thought
you have to put in, the less reliable it is.
Years ago, I was backing up a desktop PC onto floppy disks, and I had
the habit of using just one set of floppies, writing a new backup over
the previous one. One time, I was doing a backup when the hard drive was
in the process of failing, and I had a crash while I was backing up.
Thus, the new backup set was unusable, and the old backup was no longer
available. Following a reboot, I was able to run a new complete backup,
but I learned that it's important never to discard/obliterate an old
backup, until you have a usable one to replace it with.
Excellent point.
Keeping this on a slightly Seamonkey focus: ...
On my own system, I do have things set to do nightly backups (and I know
how to get to the profile data in the Windows directory hierarchy), but
with my main Seamonkey profile, I periodically use MozBackup to make an
extra copy. If I don't write that archive directly to my backup drive,
it's not a problem to drop it into a folder that normally gets backed up
as a part of the daily backup process. However, because I do that one
manually, it's a good example of why it's unwise to rely on backups that
require that you run them manually.
Yepper.
--
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
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