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JBark
Jun 27, 2000
Good passwords are a good idea.
It took me a few weeks, but I finally figured out what was used to create my 15+ year old tapes...

G3 Power Mac, MacOS 9.2.2, Retrospect 5.1. That's right, this is basically peak backup nightmare. Note that this office is, and has always been, 100% Windows PCs and servers. Apparently the guy who handled the IT stuff way back then was a huge Apple fan, so he bought a Mac to do all the backups. I can't even begin to count the number of iterations of SCSI cards, OS X versions, VMware versions, Power Macs, etc... I went through to finally work my way back to something that did the trick.

In the end, a guy in the office remembered he had an old G3 Mac in his shed that he bought from the office years ago for $5 when they were clearing out old equipment. He brought it in, and I'm pretty sure I'm actually using the exact Mac that originally did the backups all those years ago.

Oh well, I've never actually used OS9 before, so it's an interesting visit to retro land.

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ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





Wow that's a hell of a ride

Methylethylaldehyde
Oct 23, 2004

BAKA BAKA

JBark posted:

Nightmares

I had something similar, though not nearly as bad. Had the new backup server all fat and happy, shiny new LTO-5 tape deck attached. Got a request to pull a bunch of data off these old LTO-3 tapes. Tapes were apparently made using an old, lovely version of Backup Exec. lovely old backup server doesn't have a PCI-E slot for the new SAS card, so I can't hook up the tape deck. Can't P2V the lovely backup server, because I can't do hardware passthrough on my Hyper-V hosts. Swore, a lot.

Eventually I found an iSCSI tape re-director from Starwind that was free, loaded it up on the new backup server, and was able to publish the tape deck and tape changer to an iSCSI LUN and attach it to the lovely old backup server. Much rejoicing was had. Then I dumped the contents of every single old-rear end tape to scratch disk, and backed it up to new tapes. The old ones were turned into reactive range targets.

Now I use a similar iSCSI tape redirection thing to backup my home crap to tape, which is incidentally what I'll be doing for the next 6-10 days.

Farmer Crack-Ass
Jan 2, 2001

this is me posting irl

22 Eargesplitten posted:

This Black Friday I want to get an SSD and something approaching a backup system. For backups, a full-blown NAS is out of the current budget (maybe I'll ask larches about Buffalo's offerings :v:). I'm thinking of getting a ~2tb external for now. Is there a way to keep it hooked up physically, but only have it recognized when I actually want it to back up? I want to automate backups, but not have it connected 24/7 in case of cryptowall. I could write a batch or powershell script for it if I need to, I just want to make sure the idea is feasible.

What about making the backup destination read-only to your normal user account, and configure a special user account for the backup job to run as?

NihilCredo
Jun 6, 2011

iram omni possibili modo preme:
plus una illa te diffamabit, quam multæ virtutes commendabunt

22 Eargesplitten posted:

This Black Friday I want to get an SSD and something approaching a backup system. For backups, a full-blown NAS is out of the current budget (maybe I'll ask larches about Buffalo's offerings :v:). I'm thinking of getting a ~2tb external for now. Is there a way to keep it hooked up physically, but only have it recognized when I actually want it to back up? I want to automate backups, but not have it connected 24/7 in case of cryptowall. I could write a batch or powershell script for it if I need to, I just want to make sure the idea is feasible.

What I immediately thought of:



:v:

Saukkis
May 16, 2003

Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
I am Most Important Man. Most Important Man in the World.

NihilCredo posted:

What I immediately thought of:

:v:

That's pretty nice solution, you just need to make sure the drive is unmounted before the power is cut. Or as a more advanced solution use a Raspberry Pi controlled power outlet.

MikeJF
Dec 20, 2003




Saukkis posted:

That's pretty nice solution, you just need to make sure the drive is unmounted before the power is cut.

I wonder if you can get PSUs that have like 5 seconds of battery and can send an emergency unmount signal. For much cheaper than a UPS.

NihilCredo
Jun 6, 2011

iram omni possibili modo preme:
plus una illa te diffamabit, quam multæ virtutes commendabunt

If you wanted to store an extra copy of your really important data in a bank safe (or a hole in the ground), and you couldn't afford tape, which storage medium is most likely to retain data integrity after many years offline? SSDs? HDDs? Pen drives?

e: assuming you can find a SATA-to-USB 9.0 adapter in 2040, naturally.

NihilCredo fucked around with this message at 13:40 on Dec 4, 2015

Rexxed
May 1, 2010

Dis is amazing!
I gotta try dis!

NihilCredo posted:

If you wanted to store an extra copy of your really important data in a bank safe (or a hole in the ground), and you couldn't afford tape, which storage medium is most likely to retain data integrity after many years offline? SSDs? HDDs? Pen drives?

e: assuming you can find a SATA-to-USB 9.0 adapter in 2040, naturally.

For a few years a HD would probably be okay from the list you mentioned, but they make stuff like the M-DISC optical disks for long term use. They haven't been around long enough to prove that they're that reliable, but nothing has.
http://www.mdisc.com/

thebigcow
Jan 3, 2001

Bully!
You need to store extras of whatever reads that media, and whatever that thing plugs in to, and whatever software it needs, and an dand and

big shtick energy
May 27, 2004


NihilCredo posted:

If you wanted to store an extra copy of your really important data in a bank safe (or a hole in the ground), and you couldn't afford tape, which storage medium is most likely to retain data integrity after many years offline? SSDs? HDDs? Pen drives?

e: assuming you can find a SATA-to-USB 9.0 adapter in 2040, naturally.

I wouldn't trust anything flash-based past 5 years. Some of the better stuff is rated at 10 or 20 years retention unpowered, but even still flash isn't really intended for very long term data storage.

computer parts
Nov 18, 2010

PLEASE CLAP

thebigcow posted:

You need to store extras of whatever reads that media, and whatever that thing plugs in to, and whatever software it needs, and an dand and

Don't forget extra power plugs too just in case. And those converters in case we switch over to the European style.

NihilCredo
Jun 6, 2011

iram omni possibili modo preme:
plus una illa te diffamabit, quam multæ virtutes commendabunt

Rexxed posted:

For a few years a HD would probably be okay from the list you mentioned, but they make stuff like the M-DISC optical disks for long term use. They haven't been around long enough to prove that they're that reliable, but nothing has.
http://www.mdisc.com/

Ooh, right, I've been optical-drive-less for several years now so I totally forgot those existed. Their price/GB is in the same ballpark as an SSD, so not too bad, especially if you don't need terabytes of storage.

thebigcow
Jan 3, 2001

Bully!

computer parts posted:

Don't forget extra power plugs too just in case. And those converters in case we switch over to the European style.

Look pal, I don't have an AIT drive or Veritas BackuExec for Netware anymore so those tapes are basically useless :colbert:

Tesseraction
Apr 5, 2009

Finally got my LTO-4 drive up and running. :toot:

Currently using Cygwin/tar to write to it, is there any decent Windows software that doesn't cost funbux available? I mean, after the price of the drive et al it's not the end of the world but I'd rather not drop $150+ on grade-A crap.

redeyes
Sep 14, 2002

by Fluffdaddy
So I need to finally tackle cloud backups for my 8+TB of files. So far Crash plan has popped up a lot, so I am trying it but the more I read about it the more issues I read about.

Is it the currently the goon 'unlimited' cloud backup choice?

[edit] Just my files, not business.

redeyes fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Dec 26, 2015

Riso
Oct 11, 2008

by merry exmarx
I have a gig to consolidate 1.35TB of data spread over five computers and a NAS to a single location.
Sadly the password for the NAS was lost so I can only use the network because I am not playing the manual's "reset without destroying data, honest!" gambit.

I was wondering what the best Windows tool would be to copy that stuff over the network reliably. Seeing how this will take a whole weekend I don't want to babysit the transfer all the time. At most I want to pop in twice a day to check.

I know there's richcopy but that hasn't been updated since 2009.

thebigcow
Jan 3, 2001

Bully!

Riso posted:

I have a gig to consolidate 1.35TB of data spread over five computers and a NAS to a single location.
Sadly the password for the NAS was lost so I can only use the network because I am not playing the manual's "reset without destroying data, honest!" gambit.

I was wondering what the best Windows tool would be to copy that stuff over the network reliably. Seeing how this will take a whole weekend I don't want to babysit the transfer all the time. At most I want to pop in twice a day to check.

I know there's richcopy but that hasn't been updated since 2009.

Robocopy with whatever settings for retries seems appropriate to you and write a log file so you can see the failures.

redeyes
Sep 14, 2002

by Fluffdaddy

thebigcow posted:

Robocopy with whatever settings for retries seems appropriate to you and write a log file so you can see the failures.

I swear, there has GOT to be a decent GUI for robocopy. Or at least something with a decent gui for drag and dropping. I used to use SuperCopier back in the day before it turned into junkware.

NihilCredo
Jun 6, 2011

iram omni possibili modo preme:
plus una illa te diffamabit, quam multæ virtutes commendabunt

redeyes posted:

I swear, there has GOT to be a decent GUI for robocopy. Or at least something with a decent gui for drag and dropping. I used to use SuperCopier back in the day before it turned into junkware.

For everyday use, I run TeraCopy because it has the best GUI and general usability of all file-transfer utilities, by far. (The next version is currently in alpha and looks even nicer.)

For Riso's use-case, however, I'd recommend UltraCopier instead (which is actually the successor to SuperCopier - I'm curious about what you mean by "junkware", they're both FOSS projects). It's a little clunkier than TeraCopy, but it has several useful features for large-scale copies. It's what I used only a week ago to copy around 2.5TB of files from my older drives to my new one.

ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





redeyes posted:

So I need to finally tackle cloud backups for my 8+TB of files. So far Crash plan has popped up a lot, so I am trying it but the more I read about it the more issues I read about.

Is it the currently the goon 'unlimited' cloud backup choice?

[edit] Just my files, not business.

Crashplan, Backblaze, Carbonite. All three are approximately the same, with some differences, primarily in how they handle network and external storage. Find the one that fits your needs.

Riso posted:

I have a gig to consolidate 1.35TB of data spread over five computers and a NAS to a single location.
Sadly the password for the NAS was lost so I can only use the network because I am not playing the manual's "reset without destroying data, honest!" gambit.

I was wondering what the best Windows tool would be to copy that stuff over the network reliably. Seeing how this will take a whole weekend I don't want to babysit the transfer all the time. At most I want to pop in twice a day to check.

I know there's richcopy but that hasn't been updated since 2009.

Robocopy. For real.

thebigcow
Jan 3, 2001

Bully!

redeyes posted:

I swear, there has GOT to be a decent GUI for robocopy. Or at least something with a decent gui for drag and dropping. I used to use SuperCopier back in the day before it turned into junkware.

It's the sort of thing where the only people who use it learn the options quickly enough to get the job done or script it and then stop caring.

Riso
Oct 11, 2008

by merry exmarx
Ah right, robocopy. I nearly forgot that one.

Thanks for the suggestions, guys.

quote:

I swear, there has GOT to be a decent GUI for robocopy. Or at least something with a decent gui for drag and dropping.

I seem to have actually found a usable gui but it's in German only http://yarcgui.wilkes.es/

CommieGIR
Aug 22, 2006

The blue glow is a feature, not a bug


Pillbug
Any outside opinions on Iperius backup? I have it running on my home server for backing up to an external disk, and it seems pretty good.

Coxswain Balls
Jun 4, 2001

http://www.bestbuy.ca/en-CA/product...0/10361070.aspx

I can get one of those at $250CAD. Are there any issues with USB3 drives for backup purposes (specifically that one)? Other 8TB drives seem way more expensive, but I'm wondering if there's an actual reason for that. I'd be using it to do weekly backups from a 6TB FreeNAS machine to store offsite.

ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





Coxswain Balls posted:

http://www.bestbuy.ca/en-CA/product...0/10361070.aspx

I can get one of those at $250CAD. Are there any issues with USB3 drives for backup purposes (specifically that one)? Other 8TB drives seem way more expensive, but I'm wondering if there's an actual reason for that. I'd be using it to do weekly backups from a 6TB FreeNAS machine to store offsite.

No particular problems. Good job on being proactive!

MrCodeDude
Aug 31, 2005
My parent's home backup setup is:

Computers > Crashplan Cloud
Computers > NAS (via Synology Cloud Station)
NAS > External HDD (weekly)
NAS > Secondary Media NAS (weekly)

They have two NAS devices: a Synology DS213+ and a QNAP TS-412. The DS213+ only holds photos, sync'd files, and backups. QNAP holds backups from the Synology and their media library.

CrashPlan runs out in three months and I was wondering if I should switch to SpiderOak (which does file syncing) or Amazon Glacier/Amazon Cloud/Google Drive/etc?

Synology looks to have a Glacier package, which would be great, because then I can backup to the cloud from the NAS, instead of their computers (which they love to turn off at night).

Note that I don't live with my parents and see them once every 2-3 months, so the simpler the solution, the better (which is one pro of Crashplan).

MrCodeDude fucked around with this message at 09:08 on Dec 29, 2015

ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





MrCodeDude posted:

My parent's home backup setup is:

Computers > Crashplan Cloud
Computers > NAS (via Synology Cloud Station)
NAS > External HDD (weekly)
NAS > Secondary Media NAS (weekly)

They have two NAS devices: a Synology DS213+ and a QNAP TS-412. The DS213+ only holds photos, sync'd files, and backups. QNAP holds backups from the Synology and their media library.

CrashPlan runs out in three months and I was wondering if I should switch to SpiderOak (which does file syncing) or Amazon Glacier/Amazon Cloud/Google Drive/etc?

Synology looks to have a Glacier package, which would be great, because then I can backup to the cloud from the NAS, instead of their computers (which they love to turn off at night).

Note that I don't live with my parents and see them once every 2-3 months, so the simpler the solution, the better (which is one pro of Crashplan).

If what you have works, I'd recommend sticking with that. But if price and/or convenience is a factor, Synology's glacier backup is pretty easy...

You could also do that in addition to your workstation plan if you're really paranoid.

ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





Separate post so not to get list in the big quote-reply above.


Looks like someone started a referral thread for Backblaze backups over in the Deals forum.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3757569

BB is pretty good. I consider Carbonite, Crashplan, and Backblaze to all be relatively equal in the grand scheme of things for regular home use. If BB meets your needs and only price is holding you back, this is a pretty good deal!

MrCodeDude
Aug 31, 2005

ConfusedUs posted:

If what you have works, I'd recommend sticking with that. But if price and/or convenience is a factor, Synology's glacier backup is pretty easy...

You could also do that in addition to your workstation plan if you're really paranoid.

Guess it makes sense to at least try. My parent's downgraded their Internet service, so I'll probably have to send Amazon an HDD to seed.

Has anyone sent their HDD to Amazon? How simple/painful is the process?

BlueBlazer
Apr 1, 2010

FunOne posted:

I was looking for some software that would just let me backup to my own Amazon or Google storage buckets. I'm paying a hefty price for the small number of GBs I've actually backed up, but I still want proper versioning and whatnot.

And Cloudberry isn't a great choice because my second backup to a local disk is over 1tb.

Dupliciti. Works with ANYTHING.

Saukkis
May 16, 2003

Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
I am Most Important Man. Most Important Man in the World.

MrCodeDude posted:

CrashPlan runs out in three months and I was wondering if I should switch to SpiderOak (which does file syncing) or Amazon Glacier/Amazon Cloud/Google Drive/etc?

Synology looks to have a Glacier package, which would be great, because then I can backup to the cloud from the NAS, instead of their computers (which they love to turn off at night).

Here's a horror story about recovery from Amazon Glacier.

How I ended up paying $150 for a single 60GB download from Amazon Glacier

MrCodeDude
Aug 31, 2005

Saukkis posted:

Here's a horror story about recovery from Amazon Glacier.

How I ended up paying $150 for a single 60GB download from Amazon Glacier

Yeah, saw that. Luckily I didn't have time to set up Glacier at my parents' place.

meatpath
Feb 13, 2003

Can anyone recommend me a good/best cloud storage service? I'm not looking for a free option. I am strictly using this to be an online backup of my music library and nothing else. I do not want to be able to stream my library from the storage itself or anything like that. I just want a bucket to throw it into in case my physical drives ever fail/are stolen/etc. Total size is currently a bit north of 150 GB, and I'm on Linux. I don't need fancy native applications to interact with the storage (a la Amazon Cloud Drive), since this will hopefully be something I would only have to access in an emergency, so a web-based interface is fine.

Curvature of Earth
Sep 9, 2011

Projected cost of
invading Canada:
$900
Edit: wrong thread

Curvature of Earth fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Feb 6, 2016

kri kri
Jul 18, 2007

68k posted:

Can anyone recommend me a good/best cloud storage service? I'm not looking for a free option. I am strictly using this to be an online backup of my music library and nothing else. I do not want to be able to stream my library from the storage itself or anything like that. I just want a bucket to throw it into in case my physical drives ever fail/are stolen/etc. Total size is currently a bit north of 150 GB, and I'm on Linux. I don't need fancy native applications to interact with the storage (a la Amazon Cloud Drive), since this will hopefully be something I would only have to access in an emergency, so a web-based interface is fine.

Crashplan

roadhead
Dec 25, 2001

Ok current setup for "important" data is a two-drive ZFS mirror that rsyncs nightly to the Raidz-2.

The biggest downside here is all of these drives are in the same machine which is obviously bad.

Anyone here using Duply/Duplicity/Boto/S3 ? I backed up and restored a small portion of data last night and it seems to work OK, but what are the long term things to worry about?

Obviously the key I'm encrypting the data with is now just as important as the data, along with whatever other metadata this house of cards needs to actually understand and retrieve the data. Do I need a separate off-site backup of the duply directory itself?

RusteJuxx
Jul 14, 2001

College Slice

68k posted:

Can anyone recommend me a good/best cloud storage service? I'm not looking for a free option. I am strictly using this to be an online backup of my music library and nothing else. I do not want to be able to stream my library from the storage itself or anything like that. I just want a bucket to throw it into in case my physical drives ever fail/are stolen/etc. Total size is currently a bit north of 150 GB, and I'm on Linux. I don't need fancy native applications to interact with the storage (a la Amazon Cloud Drive), since this will hopefully be something I would only have to access in an emergency, so a web-based interface is fine.

Well, Google Music is free, but it'd be a good solution for only 150 GB of music. It can hold up to 50,000 songs. I have all my stuff in iTunes Match, but prior to trusting Match I threw all of my stuff in Google Music and it was fine. It saves your custom tags and file names without issue. Upload and downloaded is handled through the web interface at play.google.com. I also have it all backed up with my documents in Spideroak.

But yeah, if you want to spend money - Crashplan should cool.

meatpath
Feb 13, 2003

Yea, Crashplan does seem like a good thing to look into. I forgot to mention that I would like to store hi-res album artwork, as well. Thanks for the recommendations!

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cmykJester
Feb 16, 2011

by Nyc_Tattoo
I have been rethinking my backup solution lately. I'm a graphic designer and keep current work backed up in the Adobe Cloud, and old work on Dropbox and then having a 1TB WD MyPassport drive backing up a third copy of everything locally. However I've been finding lately that the external drive probably wasn't really meant for this use and it's randomly been disappearing.

So I was wondering what is a good external hard drive for backing stuff up?

Also in general how should I be backing stuff up, I've just been using the Windows 10 file history and Windows 7 Disk backup to write to that external drive. But I suppose I need to be able to have multiple versions of a system image backed up?

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