The website should also encourage users to download a copy of their online accounts (Google Takeout, Facebook data, etc). That's a pretty big omission in 2024. I know plenty of people who have been locked out of their own accounts for one reason or another.
In case no-one’s aware, iPhone / iPad Files app has a “Connect to Server” (…) option which can connect to an SMB share, making it significantly easier to back up any downloaded or created files to a PC without having to install and use iTunes. And there’s plugging in the device via USB, which mounts the DCIM files (photos and videos) as a mass storage device, and allows to you to back up those, too.
A gentle reminder to actually <i>TEST</i> your restore workflow.<p>WBD: since 2011! <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?q=worldbackupday" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?q=worldbackupday</a>
Went through many iterations over the years. Arq, restic, borg, tarsnap setting up encryption, incremental backups with cronjobs and all the good stuff.<p>Some years ago I realized that I value the possibility to restore also for people that are not me higher than the nerd factor and security so I just settled with Backblaze as my main backup and Time Machine for local convenience. Carbon Copy Cloned to just clone my attached drives to my NAS if they are attached.<p>For me backups are not the place to fiddle around with obscure solutions that nobody in my family would be able to use.
I work for a company that handles backup at the scale of the biggest companies in the world. And I promise you, what's hard is not the backup, it's it's security (to not lose it, to not let it get corrupt, to avoid any unintended usage, ...) and its restauration.
I was happy with my restic, borg (vorta), and tarsnap backup setup until one day I had to retrieve just one file from the backups and I realised there was no straight forward way to do that in any of these. Now I think I must look for backup which lets be “easily” get my files back and search whether something is there by a certain approximate name among my backups without having me deal with mounts (that too one version at a time) and often fail. It would be nice to just know that file/dir “abc xyz” or with similar names were backed up in snapshots m, n,…, z. Then I can just fetch the version I want.
I would add a couple of important things:<p>- mention of the 3-2-1 backup rule<p>- include emails and other social accounts into the backup strategy<p>- validating and restoring backups is as important as creating them
Very happy with Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner on my Mac. I have a dozen hard drives and SSDs that I rotate and a NAS, but I don’t use that for backup. Never lost a file. But a reminder to myself: I need off site backups.
Really, world backup day should've been on Good Friday so that world restore day could be on Easter Monday.<p>Jesus Saves! (and takes daily snapshots which he uploads to a secure offsite location)
Coincidentally this landed on my weekly backup day.<p>Using Time Machine weekly to an external SSD. Also a separate flat monthly archive to another SSD. And just in case that is not enough, rclone my documents and pictures library (everything) to S3 monthly too.<p>This is restored once a quarter into my spare Mac mini.
This is very much about personal backups but while we're here - what open source backup tools do people recommend for very simple filesystem backups to a remote server?