All good stuff. A couple of additional thoughts inserted...
Paul B. Gallagher wrote:
David E. Ross wrote:
I have files unrelated to SeaMonkey that are no less important. I
do a system-wide backup every week.
In my case, nightly (mission-critical work computer). The first week
I had a computer (a PC-XT in 1985), I lost a whole day's work by
failing to back it up. Ever since, my motto has been, "If you love
me, back me up."
Some basic principles all users should follow for backup (I'm sure
you know this, but other readers may not):
I would go one step further -- think through your potential recovery
scenarios. There's enough variants that one particular backup
methodology or tool may not fit all the possibilities for recovery.
There's a difference between doing a bare-metal recovery following a
device or controller failure and a recovery from an "oops" overwrite or
deletion of one or two critical files.
1) Do it automatically. If you have to think about it, you'll forget
or make excuses, and when disaster comes you'll lose something
important because you didn't back it up.
2) Separate the backup media from the source computer. If the backup
is killed by the same disaster as the computer, you have no backup.
And don't rely on a single media set that's continuously attached,
although this works against point 1). Now that one of the varieties of
malware that we have to account for includes ransomware, you need to
make sure that you account for the possibility of that kind of thing
encrypting your backups. Plus, there's always the the matter of making
sure you have off-site backups (think: building burning down, or a
lost/stolen laptop).
A further consideration: cloud-based backups can be one way of quickly
getting off-site, but it's one that is good not to rely on entirely. If
you can't get to your backups (no internet connectivity, DDoS of
provider, provider failure, etc.) you have no backup.
Years ago, I was backing up a desktop PC onto floppy disks, and I had
the habit of using just one set of floppies, writing a new backup over
the previous one. One time, I was doing a backup when the hard drive was
in the process of failing, and I had a crash while I was backing up.
Thus, the new backup set was unusable, and the old backup was no longer
available. Following a reboot, I was able to run a new complete backup,
but I learned that it's important never to discard/obliterate an old
backup, until you have a usable one to replace it with.
3) Use a system that doesn't impact your lifestyle or workstyle. If
it's a PITA, you'll find an excuse to abort it or cancel it, and then
you'll have no backup.
4) Test the restore function periodically. If you can't restore, you
have no backup.
Absolutely. Think: fire drill. Years ago, I had a major disaster when a
server failed, and then we discovered that the controller of the backup
device had silently failed some time previously. We didn't have any
backups.
Keeping this on a slightly Seamonkey focus: several months ago, I was
having problems with my inbox and indexing (which I discussed in this
newsgroup), and more than once, I lost most of the messages in my POP
inbox. I was grateful to have daily backups to draw from, and I needed
them more than once. For that, a file-centric backup (where I could
recover just my inbox, and not even the entire profile) was what I
needed. A full-image backup (including boot sectors and Windows
registry) would have been far less useful for that kind of recovery.
On my own system, I do have things set to do nightly backups (and I know
how to get to the profile data in the Windows directory hierarchy), but
with my main Seamonkey profile, I periodically use MozBackup to make an
extra copy. If I don't write that archive directly to my backup drive,
it's not a problem to drop it into a folder that normally gets backed up
as a part of the daily backup process. However, because I do that one
manually, it's a good example of why it's unwise to rely on backups that
require that you run them manually.
Smith
Smith
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