Continued on backup strategies at home

This is what my weekends have come to now that football is almost over and the Cardinals are on the off season….

OK so here is the scenario, on December 22nd 2017 I was curious about some network traffic that had been reported on my router as coming from my laptop. I couldn’t find anything or remember installing anything that would have caused the traffic so I was a touch concerned. I installed a application called “little snitch” or something to that effect and my Mac summarily refused to boot.

Well shit…

Some googling later I found that I could disable the KEXT file (Mac equivalent to a driver) and I would be good to go. I was less then thrilled with this revelation as I was getting ready to take a road trip to visit family. OK I’ll just restore to the last good backup this morning from Time Machine, it will take a hour tops.

I kicked off the Time Machine recovery from the rescue console, finished packing and did some other stuff. When I came back to collect my laptop it said “16 hours remaining”. Needless to say I didn’t hang around, I took off and let the Mac do it’s thing. I long ago figured out that I could survive a couple of days on a iPad and hijack my mom’s Mac if I really needed a laptop.

I come home a few days later, my Mac is restored and waiting for me to log in. I log in, everything is where it’s supposed to be the most dramatic thing I have to do is sign into Office365 for home and school again. Up until this point I had been running Time Machine strictly off a network share on my home server I keep in a closet. So yeah… that’s great for seamless backups but it’s not what I would describe as “quick”. I ended up partitioning the external disk I use on my Mac and have a partition dedicated to Time Machine, that took care of the speed and backup problem.

This also pretty much asserted once again that between Office365 and iCloud my personal files were safe and I could get to them. This also once again proved that I really didn’t need to be paying for offsite backup as the most I would have to do is download Office and VMWare again and I would be back in business.

Then I had a thought….

Crypto viruses are a thing…. would a crypto virus also lock down my cloud information. I’m sure someone out there has already researched this and has a answer, and a quick googling says yes a crypto virus will also crypto your connected cloud services. So this brought me back to well I guess I need a segregated offsite backup… I don’t need to do the whole system as I can restore that easy enough, but I do need to have a portioned setup for personal files. Crashplan fills that niche quite nicely….

So there you have it…. backup strategies circa 2018 for one random dude who is already missing football.

On backup strategies for the home…

On backup strategies for the home…

So I had a thought this evening as I was looking at my router and seeing my upload tick across the megabytes while my Crash Plan was syncing to it’s cloud backup.

Do I really need to be doing whole user directory backups to the cloud?

It was a moment of reflection, I had installed crash plan on the new Mac last year because, well that is what I always have done since 2010 when I started with Carbonite. Yes, I had Time Machine… but after the great flower fire of 2010, I had been running a dual onsite / offsite backup strategy. A little belt and suspenders for home, but practice what you preach to the people at work. Fast forward seven years and my two major reasons for doing a multi backup strategy have pretty much gone by the way side.

  1. DEAR LORD I’M THE ONLY PERSON WITH COPIES OF XYZ PICTURE… because I’m a bit of a data hoarder, and apparently no one else in my family can be bothered to learn how to use FLICKR.
  2. Cloud syncing technology is pretty seamless now for user folders.

The first problem is pretty much taken care of by the fact that every photo I take is synced to three different services pretty much automatically off of my phone or main machine within 24 hours. So no issues with losing those pictures that appear to be only backed up by me. The second one wasn’t as in your face and really didn’t hit me till the last two weeks or so.

I signed up to start taking some classes and working towards a masters (that’ s a separate blog post when I feel like talking about it). Anyway the school uses Office 365 which I subscribe to on a personal level already. My entire workspace is through the Office 365 portal on the schools website, which I thought was pretty cool. Until I signed into my personal copy at home with my school credentials and had a second instance of OneDrive sync start up. Thats when it dawned on me, I’ve been on OneDrive for a couple of years now and could lose my computer tomorrow. I wouldn’t care everything I need is up in my OneDrive… it just took a few years for that particular wall to fall.

So now as I sit here looking at my Crash Plan app I’m wondering to myself, do I actually need to continue to pay for a service that while it does provide a complete copy of all my files and 30 days of deleted files…. it’s slow as hell doing a restore and kinda cumbersome for anything more then a folder or two. Also my /User/tom folder on my Mac is 86GB after documents, pictures, music, and some video, but before any of my Virtual Machines.

So that’s something to talk about there, what about Virtual Machines or larger databases you may have on your local machine. Well for me, I use rsync for the VM files themselves to be synced to my home server. After that I really don’t care, I don’t run anything production on the VM’s they are there specifically to play with and blow away as needed. The Windows VM machines are a little bit more temperamental then Linux for me, but that’s because I get annoyed that I have to license my Windows machines versus just popping a new Linux flavor.

So at the end of the day, the question is for me is there a good reason to keep paying for Crash Plan or something of it’s ilk? I honestly don’t know, in just the writing of this post I’ve gone through a fair amount of type space that says maybe not.

Things to chew on.