On 11/15/18, Reco <recovery...@enotuniq.net> wrote: > Hi. Hi.
> On Wed, Nov 14, 2018 at 05:03:53PM -0500, Lee wrote: >> > b) You do not keep a single backup. >> > >> > Besides, avoiding all those cryptolockers is easy. You just need to >> > learn to distinguish a trusted software from the untrusted. A trusted >> > software comes to you with your OS (in this case - Debian main >> > archive). >> > An untrusted software comes from elsewhere. Keep to a trusted software >> > and you'll be fine. >> >> Most probably. But I think using Firefox comes with a certain amount >> of risk - probably not all that much on debian but still a risk; as >> does having an all-the-time online backup. > > Using any browser comes with the same amount of risk, in fact. > But if the regular user cannot overwrite the backups - there's little > harm in that. But malware can overwrite users files which then get backed up.. implying you keep lots of backups. For how long? >> > Avoiding human mistakes is impossible indeed, hence the backups. And >> > filesystem snapshots, but that's a different matter. >> > >> > >> >> > And, I'm strong believer of 'machine works, human thinks' principle. >> >> > Automating backups to NFS (and replicating them from there) is >> >> > simple. >> >> > Automating backup to USB drive - that's something that cannot be >> >> > done >> >> > without human intervention. >> >> > >> >> >> In other words, what am I missing? >> > >> > A good backup is run by cron. A bad backup is run manually. >> > Simple as that. If I ever put debian on something I don't turn off then cron is an option. But right now I've got debian on a laptop that I don't leave running 24x7 >> How do you check that your cron backups worked? Which is assuming you >> do check :) >> The manual backups I do are fast enough that I can watch and see that >> nothing went wrong. > > Cron can and will send a e-mail to a pre-determined address, if a batch > job writes something to stdout/stderr. > So then you do a backup, you have two choices: > > a) Log all and everything, and get your e-mail every day. > b) Log errors only and get your e-mail only if something goes wrong. > > I prefer the latter, but YMMV. I prefer getting email every day - with a "no problems" subject line if all goes right. There's been times at work when something goes wrong & part of the something was mail on the cron server. I just tried running a cron job that fails (didn't chmod +x thescript). No mail Yeah.. I know. Someday. But setting up mail is way down on my priority list somewhere after "install debian on a machine I'll leave running 24x7" and I'm still working on "figure out how to dump windows." Thanks, Lee
