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                    JOURNAL FOR SUNDAY 14TH JANUARY, 2018
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: On the importance of backups
   DATE: Sun 14 Jan 14:04:48 GMT 2018

Argh! :(

What a week. After ending last year with the Intel Management Engine, Server
Platform Services and Trusted Execution Engine vulnerabilities we now have
Meltdown and Spectre[1] to deal with.

Thankfully the Raspberry Pis are not vulnerable. Maybe it's Time for an ARM
based desktop? It also makes me wish I had gone for an ARM Chromebook. At
least Google has already issued updates[2] for the Acer CB5-132T (including a
firmware update) and for other Chromebooks as well. Which reminds me, I now
have a Raspberry Pi Zero W to add to my collection :)

When it comes to updating mainstream machines there seems to be a lot of
issues from patches and firmware being released before it's quite ready. This
is resulting in a lot of broken systems, bricked laptops and PCs that keep
rebooting, freezing or randomly locking up and crashing.

In other news: I accidentally, partially trashed my home directory on my
development box - ouch :( No, it wasn't Meltdown or Spectre related. It was
just me doing something stupid. Cleaning up the fallout has taken a while.

“Don't you have backups!?” I hear you cry. Yes I do, but only a remote daily
backup made to another machine at 3am which overwrites the previous day's
backup. I didn't notice anything for two days due to other weird issues and
stability problems with recent updates - see above.

Why only a single backup? Money, of which I have very little and not enough to
get a batch of hard drives for backups.

In an ideal world I'd have at least ten backups. Six daily for Monday to
Saturday and four weekly for Sundays. That way you can use ten backups to go
back four weeks. For my current system I'd need 1Tb drives for full system
backups. At about £50 a drive that's £500 plus some basic enclosures at around
£20 each is another £200. So £700 to set up some basic backups.

Actually thinking about it, if I only backed up my home directory and dropped
stuff like virtual machines, music and downloads I could probably reduce my
backup footprint to less than 32Gb. I could get ten 32Gb micro SD Cards, from
a well known brand, for about £15 each, so £150 all in.

Micro SD cards for backups may seem a bit of an odd choice. However they have
the advantage of being temperature, water, shock and x-ray resistant. They are
also tiny and more convenient to store. Having used them in several Raspberry
Pi for a number of years they have also proven to be very reliable. In the
case of backups you wouldn't be reading and writing the storage all day long.
So something I might seriously consider. If it doesn't work out? Well, I can
reuse the SD cards for my Raspberry Pis or for my family's collection of
smartphones, tablets, Chromebooks and digital cameras.

--
Diddymus

  [1] Meltdown & Spectre: https://meltdownattack.com

  [2] Google Product Status: https://support.google.com/faqs/answer/7622138
      See link under the Google Chrome OS section for list of devices.


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