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Backups Aren't Simple

359 points · 225 comments · afilipovski

  1. publlus_enigma · · focus · HN ↗
    There are four times in my life I have suffered regrettable data loss incidents.

    The first was when the telephone pole outside our house was struck directly by lightning. Not only was it the loudest thing I have ever heard, the current surged through the telephone line, into the internal fax modem, and fries everything within its vicinity. I was 10. I did have backuos, but only only floppy and they didn't cover everything.

    The second was storing data in OneDrive - a change to their terms surrounding "lifetime" unlikely noted storage, combined with a client that was unusably slow to download and a deadline for data retrieval meant that I lost most of my files.

    The third was SD card failure in digital camera on holiday, the controller chip died catastrophically, leaving the card completely unrecognised. It was a brand new Sony 128GB card, manufactured by Toshiba, and it seemed to be a common issue. I now shoot to two cards simultaneously.

    And the fourth time was ... Performing a backup. An errant script deleted the source content, but I'd also deleted the existing backup to free up space for the new backup. I've been weary of using rewritable media for some time now as a consequence, but I think backups themselves are high risk activities.

    1. BLKNSLVR · · focus · HN ↗
      OneDrive...

      So much fail in one single product.

      1. hulitu · · focus · HN ↗
        It is made by Microsoft, the experts in this domain.
      2. sfn42 · · focus · HN ↗
        Man i absolutely hate how windows insists that my various personal folders need to be OneDrive and then complains that there's not enough space. I've tried to just disable/remove onedrive but if it's possible it's certainly not easy. I'm pretty sure there's a bunch of stuff I've lost due to the same thing the other guy described, limit was reduced and files just deleted.

        Either give me unlimited space or get out of my file system. They could have just made it a separate thing and let me put stuff in there if I wanted to, instead of hijacking my file system and just messing it up.

        1. close04 · · focus · HN ↗
          I have the paid OD, and think I know what I'm doing, and still got burned on occasions, luckily with little consequence due to other mechanisms in place. But when I really didn't want to deal with OD's crap, I went all nuclear on it. Uninstall. When MS insisted to reinstall it, I replaced the executable and went for file system permissions. I twisted them so hard that even MS couldn't (or at least didn't try to) overwrite my fake OD executable.

          I stopped running Windows wherever I can not because the tools or OS are that bad but because a machine should come with sane defaults but should respect my wishes if I want to go against those defaults. When it starts to override me, it's not my machine anymore and whoever "owns" it (MS in this case) can shove it.

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