31st March was the world backup day.
To celebrate it, I did a PR to the classic restore, adding support for automatic recognition of some of the popular compression algoriths (more details here).
Here I share some ideas on how to improve your backup routine (general and Qubes OS specific).
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Many of us have replaced our mechanical HDDs with faster SSDs. While the old HDDs are almost unusable for general day-to-day usage, they are perfectly usable for yearly backups. Even if they have bad sectors, an imperfect backup is better than no backup at all. Having a cheap USB-SATA cable or a bunch of enclosures should allow you to reuse them for backups.
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Many of us have USB-2 sticks which are either too slow or too much used/worn out. Or some of those fancy gift USB sticks which are useless for day-to-day usage. Their capacity might be limited by they are perfectly usable for backups.
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Similarly, some of us have lot’s of unused/slow microSD cards. A cheap microSD reader should allow their reuse for backups.
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Donating to Wyng project is highly recommended. As I have received news that it might be an integral part of Qubes OS in future releases. This should allow Wyng developer to dedicate more time on the project. Details are available in this forum post.
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Always have yearly backups, preferably off-site. For example if you pay a visit to your parents, in-laws, children, … you could drop (an encrypted) backup there.
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Prioritize backups. The content you create personally (e.g. your photos, documents you write, spreadsheets, …) have much higher priority than the funny videos available online or the OS installation partition. If you do not have enough storage to backup everything, backup the most important data. Do not wait for purchasing more backup medium.
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Cheap 3D printed organizers or ordinary organizers could be used to organize your backup mediums
