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The next time you accidentally close a file without saving, just keep in mind that it could be worse. You could be Marco Marsala, a hosting provider who accidentally and irrevocably deleted his entire business with a faulty line of code.
As Marsala wrote on Server Fault, a forum where he was asking for help with the bind he'd gotten himself into, "I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1535 customers ...All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too."
Years ago, in the dark days of MS-DOS*, our secretary did something similar to our 1 office PC at the time. IIRC, she typed, del *.* , at the root level, instead of at a sub-directory. Backup, what backup ?
Always alwaysalways keep copies of your critical backups on one or more *DETACHED* devices.
Ouch.
IMHO, that is only half the battle, multiple copies on different media and locations, sure but what about the integrity of the backups?
Periodically, a good admin should run a restore from a different backup media to verify it is being backed up.
If you are running a business and you do not do an online (cloud) data and image backup of your servers, that is a huge risk. Having a backup on tape and also on an external drive may not be enough.
As far as that idiot Marco goes, his next job should be something like:
Location: Mableton, GA USA (NW Atlanta suburb, 4 miles OTP)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TurcoLoco
IMHO, that is only half the battle, multiple copies on different media and locations, sure but what about the integrity of the backups?
Periodically, a good admin should run a restore from a different backup media to verify it is being backed up.
Absolutely. I even do that at home. I tend to back up to multiple external hard drives, with copies of the image files also stored on the LAN, and I will sometimes do a test restore just to make sure it works.
What happens if, while testing your backups, ransomware is encrypting those backups? Wouldn't it be better to leave your backups untested than to risk having them hijacked by connecting them to your computer?
I read elsewhere that he used the command "rm -rf"
I also remember distinctly when I was in the Linux class where I was taught that command, the instructor told us multiple times to be very careful with it.
Backups that can be altered from the source or because of what happened to the source is a big no no. I do automatic backup to my local machine of databases and files on my server daily and for one site hourly. One option I have is to delete files on the backup that no longer exist on the server, this is left unchecked.
Every couple of months I'll zip the entire backup and then run the backup program on the active backup with that checked. I'm not dealing with 1500 sites though and have the space to do this.
Quote:
Originally Posted by eok
What happens if, while testing your backups, ransomware is encrypting those backups? Wouldn't it be better to leave your backups untested than to risk having them hijacked by connecting them to your computer?
My first "backup" is the main computer itself, two drives are in RAID1 configuration. This will prevent loss of data from failed drive which is going to be most common reason. This would not help with ransomware.
Those are backed up to external drive, it's important to incorporate file history for this. Suppose you accidentally resize some images to postage sized images on your main machine, if your backup scheme simply copies the modified files to the backup drive overwriting the older files your backup is now useless. If you have file that you have edited numerous times you should be able to go back to different revisions. I believe Windows built in backup now does this, I've been meaning to test it.
To stop ransomware I've started making one time backups to DVD, this is the backup of last resort. I don't do it often and this can be a bit time consuming. At the very least you can use these for files that will not change and critical files. Photos etc.
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