And restore tested.

Yup. That’s the real lesson that Curtis teaches in his books on the subject.

Your backup is worthless if you haven’t actually tested to confirm that it actually works. And you have to periodically, re-test, as well.

The more you people keep harping on this ultra robust backup strategy, the fewer everyday average people are actually even going to attempt a backup.

1/ You're on HN, the audience isn't "everyday average people"

2/ This is like complaining that climate activists were harping too much 30 years ago, and that's why nobody listened

It's getting more average every day. QED.

> 2/ This is like complaining that climate activists were harping too much 30 years ago, and that's why nobody listened

this is a serious issue though.

if you harp too much about something, it becomes background noise. people get desensitized.

if you harp about too many things, it fatigues people as well (ever heard of "alert fatigue"?).

so yeah, harping too much, too loudly about too many things is a serious and the society should really start looking into this

(edit: i am aware of the irony of harping about harping)

What would have been the right amount of harping about the environment though? Or is it always going to be a pointless exercise trying to convince/alert people?

Or is the only way to do that successfully, doing it subconsciously/covertly like the state actors are swaying public opinion? :-/

Unfortunately I think the sweet spot is to say it once or twice, go away, and then come back later with "I told you so"

No pain no gain also goes the other way, many times people don't learn until they get slapped in the face.

> "I told you so"

That'll be fun when half the world is migrating due to extreme climate events.

1. And yet we have someone on HN reminding everyone to even have a backup in the first place so let's not assume everyone on HN can't also make "average people mistakes".

2. You mean the climate activists who used to risk their lives back in the 80s on open oceans instead of gluing themselves to streets? Yeah, the times have changed.

I agree, if it has too much friction it's more likely you will postpone it. Any option, either just a cloud backup tool or a spare HDD or SSD with CCC or TimeMachine is better than nothing. And you have to plan for the most likely case, e.g. spilling beer on the laptop vs the house burning down.

For the house burning scenario, a cheap strategy is having one or two old HDD's in USB cases, located somewhere away from your house, in a place you regularly visit and trust security-wise. Then you can just make a habit of dumping the files there whenever visiting. Most important data of mine is safe even if internet goes down and somebody nukes the city I live in, for zero recurring cost.

While I was expressing an ideal setup, it isn’t all or nothing. A single backup is still better than none at all.

I suppose I didn’t specify exactly what I would recommend to someone who thinks it’s too hard, so here is that:

1. Install Backblaze. This is basically fire and forget. 2. (1) is enough for most people, but if interested (and on a Mac, which is what I’m familiar with), plug in an external SSD once a week or so for Time Machine. Setup involves clicking on the drive in the setup wizard and specifying an encryption password.

I don’t know about “ultra” robust, but this gives you protection from accidental deletions, natural disasters happening to your computer, hardware failures, and corruption from software bugs. The ongoing maintenance is plugging in a hard drive once a week.

If that is too much effort, just (1) provides natural disaster and hardware failure protection. It helps somewhat with the others but Backblaze only saves versions for 60 days and that’s a tight window to notice subtle corruption of e.g. your photos.

if you want to talk about 'average people' go hang out on reddit. How many times have 'average people' been brought up here explicitly to shut down a discussion. It is reductive and insulting

how many good things have 'average people' (and the avaricious wanterpreneurs chasing their dollars) ruined? Nearly everything!

The book “Backup and Recovery” was published on February 6, 2007, almost twenty years ago. I was a technical reviewer for an earlier version of this book, “Unix Backup and Recovery”, published on January 1, 1999. And these books were not the first to advocate the standard 3-2-1 model of backups. Curtis also has more modern books, if you like — such as “Modern Data Protection: Ensuring Recoverability of All Modern Workloads”, published in 2021.

If you’re not adequately backing up your data, then that is entirely on you. After thirty-plus years of this best practice guidance, there is no excuse for that kind of incompetence.

Apple makes this pretty easy with iCloud and Time Machine, but they are far from the only company trying to make this as easy as possible for their customers.