Re: [PLUG] backup lessons from a cloud storage disaster

[Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Tue, Apr 27, 2021 at 11:08 AM JP Vossen via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> I like, "There is no cloud, there is only someone else's data center."
>

I agree, because it actually encapsulates the pros and cons of the
situation.  I don't think you can talk about "the cloud" in black and
white terms and I think a lot of people in the FOSS community/etc
don't stop and think about how normal people interact with technology.

The average person keeps all their stuff on a desktop PC with a single
hard drive, and one day it stops working right and they call their IT
friend up and ask them to help them get their photos back.

For THIS average person, the cloud is a MUCH better solution.  Sure,
they're still putting all their eggs in one basket, but it is a
professionally-managed basket vs the PC sitting under their desk
buried in dust without a UPS.

I'd defer to Keith and a few other consulting-types here, but I
suspect most small businesses (who aren't paying Keith/etc) are in
similar shape.  For them the cloud is also a better solution than what
they have.

Now, for those on this list who have a RAID and an offsite backup
solution and regular testing and all that good stuff, the cloud may
very well be a step back in a lot of ways.  We're not typical IT users
though.

I think for most the practical solution is probably some kind of
combination of the cloud plus local storage.  Either it is local
storage backed up by a cloud service (Backblaze or whatever), or a
cloud service (Google Photos/Drive/etc) with local backup (Google
Takeout/etc).  That is pretty convenient to set up and protects you if
the cloud provider goes down, but also protects you if YOU go down.

For people on this list there are a lot of other options that I think
I've talked about.  Personally right now I use a combination of ZFS,
lizardfs, bacula, and duplicity+gpg+AWS.  The first two are primary
storage, the last two are backups.  Duplicity is run by cron daily so
that ensures I always have a cloud backup as a fallback, and it is
encrypted so privacy isn't really a concern here (obviously I have
offsite copies of my key as well - and that key isn't used as anything
else so basically it acts like a second factor in addition to my AWS
credentials).

-- 
Rich
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