If you’ve been using computers for a while, you probably know that it’s a good idea to back up your files. Although the technology continues to improve, there is always the chance that something is going to break, and if it does, it might take all your files with it.
I’ve tried to be careful to make backups. In fact, I probably make more backups than most people, backups of backups… Can’t be too careful, you know…
One of the things they don’t tell you, though, is that you also need to be able to restore your files from your backups.
tl;dr1: Make sure you can restore your files from the backups you make.
Your backups are pretty much useless, if you can’t use them to restore the missing files. I learned this sad truth the hard way – I couldn’t perform a restore.
The reason for this was, the backup program I used wasn’t well-considered. It (evidently) did a great job of backing stuff up. It took all my files, put them into a huge mega-file, compressed that mega-file to save space, and then broke that huge file – tens of gigabytes of data – into smaller, manageable chunks of only 50 megabytes each. That way, you could move them around without worrying about running into size limitations of files. Most systems can handle 50 M now.
So I dutifully made my backups, every week or so, and stored them off the system onto external drives and even onto DVD’s. I kept older backups, figuring it might be useful to be able to access an earlier version of some files.
One day I had a problem. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t access the drive. In order to get at it, I had to reformat, which of course took all my data. No problem; I had a backup that was only a couple of days old.
I connected the external drive and ran the restore feature… and it crashed. The restore program wouldn’t work. OK, well maybe that backup got corrupted. Lucky I’ve got another backup, only about a week old. A little inconvenient, but no big deal.
That one crashed, too. The problem was that I got no message explaining what was wrong, nor what I might do to fix it.
On the backup drive I had a directory containing over 2000 files, all 50 MB in size, all with cryptic file names with text like: 20230305T195108Z.vol4.difftar.
This told me I was fucked. I hadn’t realized these were incremental backups. I wasn’t clear what, exactly, the problem was with restoring. Without meaningful error messages I couldn’t do much about it. Also, since my system was mostly down, I didn’t have many of the tools I might otherwise have used to investigate.
I momentarily considered trying to do something like cat all the files together and then uncompress them, but… how would I even begin?
No, I was hosed because this backup program tried to get fancy and save disk space and time. Nothing wrong with that, but it made restoring impossible for me. Maybe some guru might have done it…
So, note to myself, avoid fancy backups like the plague.
I found a simple-appearing GUI program that basically ran rsync. You’d select some options, choose your source and destination, and this thing would run rsync to perform your backups. That seemed reasonable. I was careful to watch what it was doing, of course.
Rsync doesn’t compress your files. It doesn’t tar them together. It more or less “smart” copies them to their destination. You can look at those files and identify each one. It’s as though they just copied them over.
The real benefit is that rsync only copies over files that have changed. It skips all the unchanged files. That makes backing up much quicker after that first one.
This GUI program, though, had its faults as well. It seemed that if a file was missing from the source, then when I did a backup, the corresponding file would be removed from the destination. That is absolutely NOT what I would ever want. This was done quietly. Fortunately, I am paranoid about restoring, so I caught it right away and didn’t lose anything.
Finally, I just started to use rsync. Works fine, no surprises. I still don’t know how to restore, but since I can find every file in there, that doesn’t matter. Probably you restore by doing an rsync from the destination back to the source.
But we’re not done with restoring.
My websites are made with WordPress. For much of its functionality I use plugins. This is a mixed bag.
I found a plausible plugin that promised you could back up, restore, and migrate your websites. Great. So I backed up my websites and lived happily ever after… until I had a system crash and needed to restore my backups.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the plugin authors required you to pay for restoring. Backups are free; restoring costs. This wasn’t spelled out in their material.
I get that programmers want to be paid for their work. Programming is hard; it takes a lot of time, requires you to have a computer, and so on. So if you want to charge for your software, great. Name your price. I might not buy it, but I’ll at least consider it.
But what these guys did (and it’s several plugins, not just one) was to more or less forget to tell you the little detail about paying for restoring, until you needed it. Wait until they’re up the creek, and then hit them with the paddle.
This really pissed me off. Since I’ve got more time than money, I eventually manage to piece my websites back together from various sources. Had they told me up front about this, I’d have probably paid. But it came as a surprise right when I needed it, and that just pisses me off to no end. It’s dishonest.
I noticed that the files produced by those plugins had peculiar extensions and a proprietary format that I probably wouldn’t have been able to unwind. Screw ’em. I’d rather rewrite my websites from scratch, than pay through extortion. Gets me mad just thinking about it…
Well, I’ve ranted on for a bit, but there’s a point. If you get nothing else from this, just make sure that you are able to restore from your backups. Do this before you run into problems. Even if you don’t have to pay, it’s much easier to think clearly when you’re not in the middle of a crisis.
- Too Long; Didn’t Read ↩︎