"Obviously, none of this is worth anything if you don’t actually test restores."
One of my teachers claimed that contrary to common behavior, no one actually valued backups; it was restores that were worth paying for.
"Obviously, none of this is worth anything if you don’t actually test restores."
One of my teachers claimed that contrary to common behavior, no one actually valued backups; it was restores that were worth paying for.
Try running a business on that basis - where do the restores come from? 8)
We charge our customers for backup storage by volume and that includes an annual demonstration of recovery. We fire up some or all of their systems on our gear in isolation and show that they are reasonably functional.
Your teacher's comment is riffing on the well trod lines of: "heights don't kill people, it's depths that kill people", which is all about perspective. This is is not related to "guns don't kill people ..." which is about agency.
It is true that very few people proactively care about backups. It’s like flossing. People know they’re supposed to do it, but in the moment it feels like a waste of time and energy, when there are more important things to do.
When data is lost, or decay takes over, the value can skyrocket. Depending on what is lost, someone may be willing to pay 100x when they would have spent on backup in order to get their data back, this is why data recovery services can basically charge whatever they want.
My assumption is the Venn diagram between people who pass the marshmallow test, and those who proactively backup their systems, has a lot of overlap.
Running a business on that basis would look like the white(ish)-hat version of ransomware. "Oh, your data is gone? How much is it really worth to you?"
"It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end."
It is a special sensation when you go to your hand rolled backup "solution" to make some simple recoveries and start finding problems. It is a complex mix of not dread but disgust, sick to your stomach, self-anger, and loss. I can only image what that's like with like all of your children's baby pictures being the lost material. Borg and restic are fantastic, it still seems like some sort of dummy proof mode might be desirable, all the features in the world and they have some some reasonably sane policy or something that includes verifications.
On the flip side of that though, really and truly, I've restored a laptop from a timemachine backup and it came back damn nearly identical and that was magical.
>Borg ... fantastic
I needed to temporarily move off 20TB from my NAS and bought a Hetzner storage box.
I wanted to encrypt the data before sending it so i went with the borg ssh mount. Long story short, borg failed a couple of times due to https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/issues/7672, i resumed it per documentation and got 2gb of silently corrupted data. There was no way to do data integrity checks due to broken pipes and there was no option to resume the job from the previous point either. I couldn't afford to go with the s3, backblaze wasn't an option due to placing trust into their proprietary client doing the encryption and i got majorly screwed in the end.
That issue happens when the repo is corrupted? That's not the cause of the failure then.
Also you must have been unaware of Backblaze B2? It doesn't have a proprietary client, and it launched 11 years ago only a couple months after attic was forked to create borg.