Agreed, but making your own redundant backups is difficult and with plenty of pitfalls.
Do you keep your backup at home? It would be destroyed in the fire. Do you sync to some offsite which isn't the cloud? Who maintains it? How often do you do test your backups?
I have multiple backups, but they're all on drives in my house. If my house burns down, there go all my backups. That's why I keep all the important stuff on a cloud backup service as well.
I agree with what you say, I'm just nitpicking on differentiating redundancy from backups.
Yes, a building with tapes can burn down. But whether it does so or not is not correlated with the state of the system that the original data lives on.
Redundancy is a great step to prevent data loss. But redundancy won't do what a backup would: keep your data safe even if your system is fucked.
Cloud sync is a double-edged sword, because you make Dropbox a part of your system; their failures are not decoupled from yours anymore. Say, someone hacks into your Dropbox account, encrypts/deletes all data, and then downgrades/cancels your plan so that their backups go poof.
Then you'll find yourself with no data - and no backup.
Compare that to the tape burning down. You just make another tape. The chances of both your system going down, and the tape building having a fire at the same time are astronomically low, because these events are independent.
TL;DR: backups are decoupled, which is why you need them.
"Taking care of your own backups" involves moving drives off-site, like having a backup buddy you can swap drives with once in a while. Unless you do this frequently you're always at risk of losing considerable amounts of data.
Suffering a calamity that causes you to lose everything in a physical location is rare, but it happens. Floods, fires, or war do happen. Having encrypted backups in the cloud means a lot less will actually be lost in that case.
I don't think I said we weren't making backups. We have two pieces in place:
1. We are a Microsoft 365 shop, so OneDrive stores versions of files and all that. Admittedly this is not a "backup" necessarily, but it does serve a portion of the purpose of backups and are far more easily accessible to users themselves.
2. We also have a backup service running on every company issued laptop that backs up to a backup service.
What I am not advocating is that a small team should setup their own cloud for the purpose of backups. That's a lot of work and maintenance. I am an IT team of 1. My time is better spent on actually getting work done, not playing around with self hosting stuff and maintaining that.
Backups are important, otherwise I wouldn't be spending thousands of dollars on it in my tiny little budget each year. But I disagree pretty strongly with the priority of _how_ to do backups.
Any single backup is a stupid idea. Combine them, and you've got a great backup solution. Why would I keep important data in one physical location?
My house could burn down tomorrow, but I'd still have my cloud backups. My cloud backups could roast in a fire tomorrow, but I'd still have my local backups. And probably several other cloud backups.
If you put all your eggs in one backup, sooner or later, you're going to get screwed.
If you backup to a hard drive, you can simply swap your main and backup drives every now and then. If you have three drives, you can always be using one as main, one as local backup, and the third locked up offsite as the "house burns down" backup. Then swap the offsite and local backups every month.
I'm just starting to do this and it feels great. I thought about the money I pay for renters insurance, and then I realized that something much harder to replace than my furniture and other physical possessions was vulnerable not only to fire/natural disaster but plain old disk failure.
This is why I manage my backups myself. The data I really care about (mail, documents, source code, ...) is small enough to fit a couple of full copies on an inexpensive VPS, so inexpensive that I run two so if one dies I can replace it and rebuild from the other backup (which would be much faster than pushing the data back up my ADSL line). For me to lose my important data my main machines, my local offline backup device, and two VPS providers all have to die at the same time.
It isn't something I'd recommend to a non-techie though (backups are something you have to get right, and not everyone has cocked up enough to call themselves "experienced"!), it isn't free, and I don't get room to have hundreds of Gb of stuff backed up (though if I needed that, I could just rent larger VMs or even an inexpensive dedicated server), but I'm not beholden to a single company for my data's persistence.
Do you keep your backup at home? It would be destroyed in the fire. Do you sync to some offsite which isn't the cloud? Who maintains it? How often do you do test your backups?
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