[dba-Tech] Backup redux

[Arthur Fuller]

Yesterday I suffered a minor disaster. For years I've used an external USB
drive as the location of my backups. Yesterday that drive died.
Unfortunately, I also used that same drive to house my music collection.
Bad idea. Note to Self: an external drive devoted to BackUp should have no
other purpose. So now I'm going to buy another 2TB external drive, and
mirror everything of consequence.

Another lesson learned is that while developing various apps,. I would
create a directory off the root called c:\xxx, where xxx is something
meaningful. Another bad idea; should have placed these projects in the
default directory tree (My Documents), so they'd automatically be included
in the backups and I wouldn't have to remember that they were isolated from
the default backup strategy. Fortunately, I was able to recover, since I
also burned these projects of interest to a thumb drive. Actually, that's
not quite accurate; I did lose a few iterations of the data, but ultimately
that's ok since I'm developing the FE and BE as separate projects, and it
really doesn't matter that my BE data is old, since the data model has not
changed.

Long story short: I have moved all the significant data/directories from
their isolated locations, into the "Documents" folder. 'Twas a PITA but now
my arse is covered, I think.

Meanwhile I have to wait until the 28th to buy a backup^2 external drive,
but with luck, the system shall persist as is for at least that long.


Moral of the story: make sure that your backup drive has a backup; in the
ideal case, that would be on an adjacent box, or perhaps the cloud. Given
the size of my datasets (some over 50GB, and I have several of those), the
cloud seems impractical; so my only choice would seem to be a few external
1+ TB drives and to mirror everything. If you've a better strategy, I'd
love to learn it.

-- 
Arthur