The website should also encourage users to download a copy of their online accounts (Google Takeout, Facebook data, etc). That's a pretty big omission in 2024. I know plenty of people who have been locked out of their own accounts for one reason or another.

In case no-one’s aware, iPhone / iPad Files app has a “Connect to Server” (…) option which can connect to an SMB share, making it significantly easier to back up any downloaded or created files to a PC without having to install and use iTunes. And there’s plugging in the device via USB, which mounts the DCIM files (photos and videos) as a mass storage device, and allows to you to back up those, too.

A gentle reminder to actually TEST your restore workflow.

WBD: since 2011! https://hn.algolia.com/?q=worldbackupday

Went through many iterations over the years. Arq, restic, borg, tarsnap setting up encryption, incremental backups with cronjobs and all the good stuff.

Some years ago I realized that I value the possibility to restore also for people that are not me higher than the nerd factor and security so I just settled with Backblaze as my main backup and Time Machine for local convenience. Carbon Copy Cloned to just clone my attached drives to my NAS if they are attached.

For me backups are not the place to fiddle around with obscure solutions that nobody in my family would be able to use.

I work for a company that handles backup at the scale of the biggest companies in the world. And I promise you, what's hard is not the backup, it's it's security (to not lose it, to not let it get corrupt, to avoid any unintended usage, ...) and its restauration.

I was happy with my restic, borg (vorta), and tarsnap backup setup until one day I had to retrieve just one file from the backups and I realised there was no straight forward way to do that in any of these. Now I think I must look for backup which lets be “easily” get my files back and search whether something is there by a certain approximate name among my backups without having me deal with mounts (that too one version at a time) and often fail. It would be nice to just know that file/dir “abc xyz” or with similar names were backed up in snapshots m, n,…, z. Then I can just fetch the version I want.

I would add a couple of important things:

- mention of the 3-2-1 backup rule

- include emails and other social accounts into the backup strategy

- validating and restoring backups is as important as creating them

https://web.archive.org/web/20140325225131if_/http://www.wor...

Very happy with Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner on my Mac. I have a dozen hard drives and SSDs that I rotate and a NAS, but I don’t use that for backup. Never lost a file. But a reminder to myself: I need off site backups.

Really, world backup day should've been on Good Friday so that world restore day could be on Easter Monday.

Jesus Saves! (and takes daily snapshots which he uploads to a secure offsite location)

Coincidentally this landed on my weekly backup day.

Using Time Machine weekly to an external SSD. Also a separate flat monthly archive to another SSD. And just in case that is not enough, rclone my documents and pictures library (everything) to S3 monthly too.

This is restored once a quarter into my spare Mac mini.

This is very much about personal backups but while we're here - what open source backup tools do people recommend for very simple filesystem backups to a remote server?

Anyone have a good way of backing up their HN writings?

Just wait until this becomes so big that like backblaze starts crashing on March 31st because of the flood of uploads.