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I guess you didn't get my point.
If, one way or the other (I'm not going to suggest any alternative to a virus; I guess you would start arguing against that as well) all our digital processors stopped working, can you imagine the effect on our culture? It would be devastating. We have made ourselves, both personally and as a society/culture 100% dependent on digital technology.
That is what worries me. Not the probability of some randomly picked, specific threat. It could be something completely different.
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Looks like a book that I most certainly should pick up!
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trønderen wrote: If, one way or the other
Yes. As noted in my reply and in the other post - EMP. That is a high altitude electromagnetic pulse.
A nuclear weapon, high altitude can do this.
But a solar flare can also do it.
There are any number of fictional books that describe those scenarios. Some a bit more factual than others.
The most significant failure is not necessarily 'personal' electronics but rather that the entire electrical system, especially power station transformers, would be fried.
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The actual mechanism for knocking out our electronics is not essential to me. Some may be more sneaking in without our notice until it is too late (such as the virus alternative I suggested), others are more immediate and violent (such as an atomic bomb EMP or a devastating solar storm).
Total loss of electrical power is sufficient. Imagine trying to save yourself, e.g. in a remote mountain cabin together with a gang of teenagers, with no way of charging their smartphones ... And when they find a way to do it, using the solar panels at the cabin roof, they realize that the base station to which their phone tries to connect, has no power ...
That is when you regret that you didn't bring along that pile of adventure books from your grandparents' home, to read out to them for entertainment. (They probably have read too little to read the books by themselves, but anyway: Reading to a group of listeners is a great activity!)
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There is something else that could affect our electronic civilization that has a much higher probability, in fact more than most people think, and we will likely be ill prepared for it just like the last pandemic: Coronal Mass Ejections (CME). Put your backups in a Faraday cage! Which institutions and systems are prepared enough?
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None.
It would knock out the power supply. That alone would kill our culture within 24 hours.
Our homes would turn to ice (right now, my outdoors temperature is 12.4 Celsius below freezing, 10 F).
We couldn't charge our cars.
Our smartphones would go dead within a day or two.
We couldn't charge our portables, and even with a diesel generator to power our desktop PC, the concentrator for our fiber internet connection, or maybe the local ISP itself, is dead from lack of power.
The food in your freezer and fridge would rot - sooner in summertime than in winter, so what would you prefer: Freeze to death, or starve to death?
What about your 'social' contacts, the socalled 'social' media?`
What kind of entertainment would you have available?
Could you read a book in the winter evening? (And: Do you have a book?  )
Your local plant for filtering your drinking water probably depends on a huge amount of electricity. Expect it to close down.
Same with your waste water / sour processing plant. Expect it to close down.
If you want to look at your own electricity dependencies alone, disregarding things such as water supply and wastewater processing: Why don't you tonight, this Friday night, abruptly turn OFF your main electric switch (maybe you don't have a switch but you can unscrew the main fuses) without making any preparations at all. Leave the main switch off (or main fuses unscrewed) until Sunday night 8 days from now, and then tell how well you and your family fared. And how you did it, in which ways you compensated for the lack of electricity.
I don't think very many families would dare to take up this challenge. And I believe that at least half of those who dared to, would ask for at least one day to prepare for it - have all their batteries charged, their gas tanks filled up etc.
Very few of us are anywhere close to prepared for such an event.
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They might be related but it's just a snafu, not a conspiracy.
Paul Sanders.
If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter - Blaise Pascal.
Some of my best work is in the undo buffer.
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You're right, I attribute this to incompetence rather than malice.
But the main point remains...if something's important to you, you can't have the only instance of it existing only on a cloud service.
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Absolutely
Paul Sanders.
If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter - Blaise Pascal.
Some of my best work is in the undo buffer.
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I do.
An external CD drive on a usb cable to boot Acronis 2014 and a 2tb usb spinner disk to backup images to. I do it while were sleeping, It will be done in the morning. Yes it takes effort, but thinking BIG data has you back is just complacent and lazy.
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I have an external Sabrent drive that reads SDD and SATA drives, treating them like really big flash drives. Since I replace my primary HD every 2 years, I have a stack of old drives that are great for backups.
Critical files are backed up onto DVD and finalized. As I've stated in the past, a finalized CD or DVD is ransomware proof, and they're dirt cheap so making multiple copies is cost effective.
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I was surprised when my friends and coworkers one by one revealed that they no longer had any player for CD/DVD. I wanted to introduce them to some music or movies I had in my archive, but they couldn't make use of the disk. If I couldn't provide a URL for an online version, they shrugged and started talking about music/movies that are available online.
This started at least 5-6 years ago. Today, I don't know of anyone who has bought a PC with an optical reader for five years. One of my friends still have an old PC with one, but he boots up that machine only when he needs to run some old software that doesn't run on W11.
In earlier years, visiting friends with a disc in your hand was a social thing. We saw the movie together, or listened to the music. In those cases where I could dig up a URL for a friend, we never saw the movie or enjoyed the music together; he went home and watched / listened alone. In the very best case, he reported some reactions next time we met. Usually not.
So if my house burns down, and my computer media is melted, even if I had been keeping off-site optical backup disks, I would not know of anyone who could help me retrieve my files. I would have to go to some commercial and probably expensive service provider to have it done.
There is another problem with finalized DVD disks: The Tao of Backup[^], the Second Head:
The novice asked the backup master: "How often should I backup my files? It has been a month since my last backup."
The master replied: "Just as night follows day, and Autumn follows Summer, so should backups follow work. As you work, so should you backup that work."
The novice said: "I work each day".
The master replied: "Then you should backup each day".
The novice replied: "I agree, but right now I haven't got time to make a backup, as I have too much work to do."
Upon hearing this, the master fell silent.
Backing up to a finalized optical disc and bring the disc offsite every day, is beyond my working habits. 
(For those unfamiliar with The Tao of Backup: 26 years old and still 100% true! Read and enjoy it!)
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Yep, the days of CD/DVD writers are numbered. My last laptop went even further - no Ethernet port, either! And my most recent PC doesn't even have a knockout in the front panel to install a writer if I wanted to do so.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Do you have offsite copies?
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Thanks for mentioning it.
That is the only good argument in favor of online backup: Your backup is still there even if your house burns down. Many of my friends make backups of private files, but I know of noone who regularly brings a copy offsite.
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Never trust someone else with your stuff.
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Plus one for that.
Truenas is my cloud. Turn on, do stuff, turn off.
>64
Some days the dragon wins. Suck it up.
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I hardly trust myself with my stuff.
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Although fire/flood can spoil that.
Even theft. Some guys (plural) stole cases a talcum powder off a truck so who knows they might run off with something critical which would not otherwise seem to have value.
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IMHO, it's important to also back up the top three or five things in the mind, so that whatever's lost can be recovered with just self effort, even if it takes time. Am just talking of code backups here.
modified 4 days ago.
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If anyone actually expects ANY cloud service to respect their stuff then they deserve the rude awakening.
The Cloud is nothing but another tool/option. Treat it as the be-all-end-all thing the Cloud Sales people market it as then you're just waiting for a rude awakening. Treat for what it really is and you'll avoid these headaches.
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Keep in mind of course that one should consider carefully what 'backup' actually means.
Specifically even though it is seems to be working, is it being verified on a regular basis? So can one actually get to that old data?
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jschell wrote: Specifically even though it is seems to be working, is it being verified on a regular basis? So can one actually get to that old data?
Even though that's common knowledge, I have little reason to believe even someone as big as Google actually does verify its backups.
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jschell wrote: Specifically even though it is seems to be working, is it being verified on a regular basis? So can one actually get to that old data?
A former employer had a rigorous backup schedule for the office file server. Incremental backup Monday through Thursday, Friday was a complete backup that was saved for 12 weeks (tape cartridges were recycled every 12 weeks) and the last full backup of the month was saved for 12 months. We had a collection of 30-40 tapes that were all well-labeled and cycled through the process consistently.
This system had been in place for 5 years and ran flawlessly.
Then my team had to recover a file from a backup. We spent 8 hours trying to pull that file. Then any file. Then from other backups.
We had a box of tapes and not one of 'em was readable. Completely worthless. We reported this to management.
They replaced the system a year later ...
It gets better ... this was in the time when 386 was the main PC architecture. The backup system was a board that only ran in a 286, so the office used an ancient (well, ancient in computer years) PC that we could not update because the software that came with the board didn't run on newer OS. The office was on Win 3.11, can't remember what the 286 box required.
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