To go back a little- sounds like time to rearchitect the home network. I try to depend a lot less on local data on the desktop machine, I got burned by that during the IBM Deathstar era.CByrneIV wrote:Thus my statement above "negligently".Termite wrote:Exactly how does one do that........accidentally?
The factory reset routine includes a "wipe all disks" option... 2 drives in the machine, plus backup drive attached by USB.
I have a personal server with a couple of different exportable volumes (both NFS and SMB). The ordinary data volumes the desktop/client systems can automount and keep mounted forever, for convenience, even if it means that a problematic client can trash the volume. The volume on the server for backups is not mounted by default, and clients only mount it when backups are taken. (And only I regularly log in to the server. Someone else in the household has access for emergencies, but they know not to use it while I'm still vertical.)
External/USB backup drives are only attached when backups are being taken, else if you leave them attached fulltime they're really just system disk expansion not backup. And they can get trashed too easily.
Archival snapshots. Every once in a while I create an archival snapshot- these days it's burn to dvd. A long time back I had a tape drive on my server, but that fell out of favor. I always verify my backups, but the one time I needed to restore from a tape the tape was unreadable, of course....
Cloud sites make good suspenders (to back up the belt of course) for either USB external drives, or archival snapshots, or both depending on how you use them. But bandwidth being what it is (always insufficient, and local is always better) I wouldn't treat any cloud storage as anything more than just an extra layer of redundant duplication of local infrastructure.
) snapshots.