Backup and Recovery

General thoughts

Accepted wisdom:

• Three copies of your data
• Two different media
• One copy off site

Current state of affairs

(Early June 2025)

There are 30+ computers in the house, mostly Debian GNU/Linux machines both physical and virtual. 4 or so Windows machines. 4+ phones. And probably a few other things. There is no centralized backup happening for any of these, though individual hardware failures are well protected against with redundant storage. This does not help in the cases of a fat finger event or Windows malware infection, though.

Data classification

• Not replaceable, unique
  • Irreplaceable photos
  • Important financial records
  • Schoolwork
  • Project work (like this Wiki's contents)
  • Email
  • Disk encryption passhphrases
• Inconvenient to replace
  • Server configuration files (/etc and the like)
  • Not sure what else might go here
• Mundane
  • Not sure what goes here at all

Moving forward

Requirements:

• Put family members at ease that a hardware failure, malware event, or physical catastrophe does not lose a lifetime's irreplaceable computer data
• RPO (recovery point objective) of one day. No more than one day's data might be lost.
• RTO (recovery time objective) of one week. It might take some time to retrieve the data, but the process will work eventually.
• Multiple eggs, multiple baskets: No single technology or vendor holds all the data.
• Any dependencies on external data vendors (cloud backup companies, etc) be minimal in dollar expenditure.
  • Some vendors are cheap for upload and storage, but charge for retrieval. These are still worth exploring.