Aaand it happened. Not for me luckily, but for my father. His PC suddenly died.
He does have a bunch of PCs, mostly laptops, and some are for work and others
for private stuff. But yeah, this specific PC was **old**. Very old. And it
contained basically all the financial data my dad had and has to handle.
**A lot** of **very important** data. And all was gone.
You probably can imagine he was absolutely freaking out. The amount of stress
when you loose data, especially seriously important stuff, is just
indescriptable. To keep things short: It was a motherboard issue. I was able to
retrieve all data from these old hard drives with some USB to SATA adapters.
Thank God!
A good thing that came out of this story is that we later talked a bit about
proper backup techniques and practice. I have to confess: I am sloppy with
backups myself. I do have proper backups of _some_ of my data. But there is
actually data I consider important sitting on only one hard drive right now.
Shame on me! But you know how it is: At some point I probably said
"I'll do it later" and just never came around actually doing it. Absolutely
negligent, I know.
The thing is: After I had preached my father the holy rules of doing proper
backups, he then asked me the question of all questions: "How do **you** do it?"
Since I did not want to stand there like the idiot I am, I then answered
something like "_I have my own system... lots of scripts I wrote myself...
I do it in a very complicated way... just way too confusing for you..._"
So he asked me: "Do you know an easy method how **I** can do backups?"
I then remembered something. Just that very morning I had an article about a
backup tool somewhere in my RSS feed. A short search later I found out it's an
article by
[FOSS Post](https://fosspost.org/duplicati-easy-desktop-open-source-backup/)
about a nice little tool called
[Duplicati](https://www.duplicati.com/).
Really, the original article says it all. Duplicati is Free and OpenSource
Software, and while it is still in beta stage, you **can** already use it,
it is pretty stable. It's mostly written in C#, so on Linux you need the Mono
runtime. But I had no problems whatsoever to set it up on Fedora and on
Windows 10. It consists of two components: frontend and backend. The frontend
is basically a webserver and lets you do all the configuring inside your
browser. That way the program looks and feels the same on all platforms.
The backend is a process that is launched at startup and just executes all the
"backup jobs" you have configured in your schedule. It is all very intuitive and
self-explanatory.
Duplicati lets you do backups from one drive to another, or -
as it's actually intended to - do remote backups to some network device. It
basically supports all protocols you might ever need (sftp, webdav, etc.).
It **is** extremely simple - **by design**. And that makes it perfect for
people like my father. Easy to setup, easy to configure, easy to monitor, aaand
in case shit happens: easy to restore!
We've got him a little NAS (just 1TB) and a subscription for some online cloud
storage. At first, he didn't like the idea of having financial data in a cloud.
But did you know that Duplicati also allows you to **encrypt** your online
backups on-the-fly? All the cloud will ever see is noise. This convinced him and
now he has a best-practice 3-drives@2-locations backup system in-place.
His data is actually **a lot** safer now than mine.
Execuse me real quick I have to get some drives and put my own backup system
in place...
