Backups: You're doing 'em wrong!

this is my nas this is where i put all my video projects and a whole lot more for a long time i just had one copy of everything that's not great if there was a fire all my data would be gone or what if redshirt jeff pulled one of my hard drives and ram set a nail through it dramatic i know but in either case the data would be toast so now i have a backup and actually i have more than one backups aren't just when you plug in a hard drive and copy stuff to it if you're doing it that way you're doing it wrong you might be saying jeff all my photos are in the cloud and i do all my email spreadsheets and stuff online my stuff's already backed up wrong first the cloud is just someone else's computer and second you still need backups and to tell you why let's start with the basics one two three well it's a tiny bit more advanced than that it's the same thing but backwards any data you care about should be backed up following a 3-2-1 backup plan you should have three copies of all your important data two of those copies should be on different storage media and at least one of those copies should be off-site somewhere physically distant if you're relying on google drive or icloud or something like that that's just one copy you should still have two more copies if you want to be safe but what's important data is it the scan of an old essay about computers from when i was in grade school is it this old picture of my dad teaching me how to ride a bike from the 80s well important data is subjective it's different for everyone but i'm sure you have some things like family photos or important documents that you care about if you want to make sure you don't lose those files you need to cover all three parts of the three to one backup plan and if you think you're somehow covered by using fancy raid setups or zfs snapshots on a single storage array you're not repeat it after me raid is not a backup raid is helpful in many cases especially if you have a huge amount of data stored but it doesn't matter if you have a nas in raid 10 or something like that it still only counts as one copy and you need two more to be safe i'm going to show you how i back up all my data and hopefully you can get some inspiration for ways to improve your own backups the most important thing i did before i bought my nas was i took an inventory so i knew what i was going to back up and how much storage space i needed all my data can be lumped into six categories photos music documents in my dropbox local files outside my dropbox all my open source projects and finally my massive video library for each category i follow the 321 backup plan my photo library with over 70 000 raw files is more than a terabyte i have thousands of files from paid photo shoots and thousands more of my growing family so the library is priceless to me i store one copy on my mac locally with all the original photos another copies on my nas via time machine backup and the third remote backup is to my icloud photo library some people hate it but the convenience of something like apple or google's cloud library assuming you have an iphone or android is life-changing in terms of trust i know i'll get some sour comments but i've been using icloud since it was eye tools and lived through the horrible abomination known as mobileme but you know what because i also keep at least two other backups i've never lost an image moving on to my music library i have a lot of independent and children's music that isn't on apple music or spotify i use apple's icloud music library and itunes match and have all the original files on my mac and a time machine backup to be safe i keep important files like old schoolwork and business documents in my dropbox that's all stored locally on my nas via time machine and on dropbox in the cloud and for anyone about to comment about how i should try out nexsud don't worry it's in the works i haven't been too impressed with dropbox over the past few years some other local files are only backed up on my nas via time machine and they're not on the cloud so there's a small hole here but it's only temporary since most of those things are things like os images that i could redownload my open source projects are a little more complicated almost all of them are on my mac since that's my main workspace and that's backed up to my nas via time machine but i don't have every project on my mac even if i did my mac might not always have the latest code since i don't do all my work on my main mac so i have a separate backup on my nas that uses gick up cool aside gic was created by github user cooper spencer after he saw me tweeting about code backups it was really cool to see this nice flexible open source get backup tool created just from that tweet so now i have one copy on my mac another copy guaranteed to be up to date on the nas and a third copy the source of truth on github finally i have all my video content after this channel started blowing up last year backing up all my video projects got a lot more important and i went from maybe having 10 or 20 gigabytes of video a year to having five terabytes this year so once i put this new nasa in service i got more serious about backups i usually had two copies of most things before but they were spread out over a bunch of hard drives with no automation or documentation but that's all changed now i have one copy on my primary nas a synchronized copy on a backup nas and a third copy in the cloud and that's coordinated through this raspberry pi my backup pi i back up over six terabytes of data to aws glacier using rclone rclone's an open source tool for synchronizing stuff to and from any cloud storage provider like backblaze google or aws i store my backup in glacier because it's cheap like really really cheap i pay four bucks a month to back up six terabytes now before you rush to the comments i know restores with glacier can take a while to start and they cost more since they're offline but you got to remember the glacier backup is for major emergencies only things have to be pretty bad like a nuclear attack a burn down house or a redshirt jeff rampage before i need to use it but back to the pie it also runs gick up and the pie logs everything so i can make sure backups are running there are a thousand other ways to implement a good backup plan and great software like rustic arc borg and crashplane i'm a video maker and developer so my plan is probably a lot different than yours maybe you could just get by with two external hard drives rotating them out in a remote location for the third copy but people tend to have a lot of data nowadays maybe that's you instead of relying on a pre-installed backup app or manual single drive backups you should take a data inventory write up a real backup plan and use robust backup tools to make sure you're covered top to bottom for my plan i created this open source repo and it has my entire plan and includes all the automation i use for my backups even if my whole network rack got thanos snapped out of existence right now i'd be okay since everything's backed up and documented and almost everything's automated but my plan is not perfect an important counterpart is a disaster recovery plan for a lot of my data i kind of whimp out and say i'll cross that bridge if i ever need to but you know the worst possible time to test a disaster recovery plan in the middle of a disaster if my house burns down i have to ask how long would it take before i could be productive again at least in terms of my data would it take a day a week the only way to really know is to make a plan and test the plan and i've only done a little of that to truly rest easy you have to have great backups following a 3-2-1 back-up plan and test your recovery process i still have other holes in my plan too some devices like my network router and switches have custom configurations that aren't automatically backed up it's hard to automate configuration or backups for most consumer networking gear but i can't always do better and i think that's the theme with backups you can almost always do better than you are right now i hope something in this video helped you fill a hole in your own plan if you're not backing up anything at all at least go buy a hard drive and back up your computer windows has backup and recovery mac os has time machine and linux has well a lot of different options but most of them are easy to use and if you're already using a hard drive or nas maybe also back up to a cloud service or rotate out two backup drives we can all improve our backups it's a never-ending journey the key is to find a place you're comfortable i'll conclude by saying there are two types of people in this world people who have lost important data before and people who will lose important data in both cases people with a good backup plan sleep easier at night that is unless they have a nightmare about redshirt jeff running around with a nail gun but anyways until next time i'm jeff gearling you

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 281,964

Keywords: backup, backups, computer, mac, time machine, restore, dr, data recovery, disaster recovery, backup plan, 321, 123, 3-2-1, backup & restore, process, backblaze, aws, glacier, s3, rclone, rsync, copy, nas, asustor, synology, qnap, network attached storage, hard drive, ssd, red shirt jeff, ramset, nail, rsj, restic, arq, crashplan, cloud, local, files, photos, library, media, ccc, carbon copy cloner, macos, windows, linux, guide, raspberry pi

Id: S0KZ5iXTkzg

Length: 8min 53sec (533 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 08 2021