datahoarder
Who are we?
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). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
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Thank you so much for all the information! I actually simply use rsync to synchronize all my data to whichever backup drive is connected. Are there benefits to using dar instead of rsync? I haven't used dar before. I also haven't dabbled in encrypting my backup... My concern with that would be the additional time it takes to encrypt everything, as well as my fear of losing the ability to decrypt it. I am mostly putting this out there to see if anyone has suggestions for different media I hadn't thought of, or if anyone sees any pitfalls in my plan I hadn't thought of. I'm planning on storing the enclosure in a phoenix datacare 2001 fireproof safe. It's supposed to be able to keep hard drives, CDs, tapes, etc. safe in a fire for over an hour.
The benefit of using something fancier than rsync is that you get a point-in-time recovery capability.
For example, if you switch the enclosures weekly, rsync gives you two recovery options: restore to yesterday's state (from the enclosure not in the safe) and restore to a state from 2-7 days ago (from the one in the safe, depending on when it went into the safe).
Daily incremental backups with a fancy tool like dar let you restore to any previous state. Instead of two options, you have hundreds of options, one for each day. This is useful when you mess up something in the archive (eg: accidentally delete or overwrite it) and don't notice right away: It appeared, was ok for awhile, then it was bad/gone and that bad/gone state was backed up. It's nice to be able to jump back in time to the brief it-was-ok state & pluck the content back out.
If you have other protections against accidental overwrite (like you only back up git repos that already capture the full history, and you
git fsckthem regularly) — then the fancier tools don't provide much benefit.I just assumed that you'd want this capability because many folks do and it's fairly easy to get with modern tools, but if rsync is working for you, no need to change.
Thank you, it sounds great, I will look more into dar.