That certainly makes the appealing idea of Cloud-based backups rather less attractive (although you could perhaps negotiate or design around it). I looked into Cloud solutions briefly, but was rather put off by the clauses in Amazon’s agreements, such as 7.2 ("you acknowledge that you bear sole responsibility for adequate security, protection and backup of Your Content"), or 11.5, disclaiming any warranty "THAT THE DATA YOU STORE WITHIN THE SERVICE OFFERINGS WILL BE SECURE OR NOT OTHERWISE LOST OR DAMAGED" (more on this another time). As far as I can see, there is no good, simple, low cost, standardised way to organise backup!
Openzfs carbon copy cloner software#
I know this doesn't translate easily into budget for corporate systems, but it certainly should.īut this one-off solution still leaves me unable to answer a simple question: are my project’s data adequately backed up? My solution works for someone with a Mac the software doesn’t work on Windows. By the way, that simple, self-powered disk cost less than £100, and a colleague says I should have paid less. I backup a bit more (Pictures folders etc), but it’s MUCH slower, taking maybe 12 minutes, most of which seems to be a very laborious trek through the filesystem (rsync clearly does the same task much faster).
My current personal backup solution was to supplement the partial rsync backup with a separate backup (using the excellent Carbon Copy Cloner) to a 500 GB disk kept at home, on a USB 2 port. Remember, disk is cheap! No-one buys a computer with less than 100 GB these days. But that already doesn’t work as my needs increase. But I keep downloading reports and other documents, and soon I’ll be bumping up against that quota limit again.įor a while I supplemented this with backup DVDs, and there’s quite a pile of them on my desk. Someone wrote a tiny script for me that I run in the underlying UNIX system typically it takes scarcely a couple of minutes to rsync the Desktop, my Documents and Library folders (including email, about 9 GB in all), when in the office. The simplest backup strategy for me is to rsync key directories onto a corporate disk drive, and let the corporate systems take the backup from there. My corporate disk quota has been pushed up to a quite generous 10 GB. To take my own example, I have a self-managed Mac laptop with 110 GB of disk or so. At a recent meeting, we even heard of examples of IT departments discouraging researchers from keeping their data on the backed-up part of their corporate systems, presumably for reasons of volume, expense, etc. The "good sense" of researchers apparently leaves a lot to be desired, according to a few surveys we've seen over the past couple of years, including the StORe project (mentioned in an earlier blog post).
Openzfs carbon copy cloner windows#
My own project has Windows and Mac systems (at least), and is complicated by being spread across several institutions. But the laptops, often the researchers’ primary machines, were very exposed. Desktop machines in that group tended to be better protected, with a corporate Desktop, networked drives and organised back systems. One I saw recently had pretty much the entire gamut: more than one version of MS Windows, more than one version of MacOS/X, and several versions of Linux, all these on laptops. In my experience, this means a wide variety of equipment, both desktop and laptop with several flavours of operating system in the one research group. But others will leave many things to the “good sense” of the researchers. Yes, some labs will be well organised, with good systems in place. They have their own ways of doing things. They often travel a lot, away from the office for long periods. Researchers are bright, they question authority, they are even idiosyncratic. Or worse, they think that having uploaded their photos to Flickr means they are backed up and even preserved. But I’m willing to bet that the majority of people have quite inadequate backup for the home computer systems the systems on which, these days, they keep their photos, their emails, their important documents. Of course the obvious reaction at this point might be to say, tsk tsk, proper backups, of course, everyone should do that. You can’t curate what isn’t there! Anyway, that part went down very well. But all is for nothing if those elementary prior precautions of making proper backups are not observed. Curation and preservation are about doing better research, and reducing risk to the research enterprise. But somewhat at the last minute I added a scarcely relevant extra slide on my favourite bete noir: Preservation’s dirty little secret, namely backup, or rather the lack of it. I did a presentation on Trust and Digital Archives at the PASIG Malta meeting not a very good presentation, I felt.
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