4 ms·

The author of that issue said they had backups, on an external drive.. that Steam also wiped. You can say 'robust' but there are limits of what I think one can

by lucb1e 7y ago

The author of that issue said they had backups, on an external drive.. that Steam also wiped. You can say 'robust' but there are limits of what I think one can reasonably expect from a user. That they had backups at all is not necessarily the norm.

PureParadigm 7y ago
Right, that's why I said robust. But I'd push back against the idea that a normal user shouldn't be expected to have backups that are safe in such an event. If you want to guard against rogue software (or clumsy fingers in the terminal), you'll probably need to have remote backups. It sounds like copies on the cloud saved this user, and it's not unrealistic to suggest users backup to the cloud (I think many already do with OneDrive/iCloud/Dropbox). If you're a Linux user who likes to tinker, you can set up a Raspberry Pi with a hard drive attached and use restic over SFTP (or any of the other numerous choices).
- lucb1e 7y ago
  > I'd push back against the idea that a normal user shouldn't be expected to have backups that are safe in such an event. That is fair. I was commenting from the perspective of what is rather than what should be. Alongside making software as safe as possible, we should also be encouraging and expecting people to do this.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Cloud is not backup! Rogue software can erase you cloud data too. You can't call Google or Dropbox and ask for last week's version of your cloud files.
  - meribold 7y ago
    Agree about Google and Dropbox, but rsync.net has read-only snapshots so you can call them and ask for old files.
    - lucb1e 7y ago
      And Tarsnap. Not sure if rsync can do local encryption these days? So I guess 'for the paranoid' (as Tarsnap's tagline is), Tarsnap with write-only keys might be better.
    - rsync 7y ago
      This is correct. I can't speak to what you can do with google, but you can, in fact, call (or email) rsync.net and ask for old files. By old files, that can mean any snapshot schedule you choose to set up (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly ...).
benibela 7y ago
I used to set the append-only extended file attribute on important files No one can delete the files afterwards, not even root, without removing the attribute first It worked well with Mercurial, which is also append only. So I could commit as usually to my Mercurial repository, but it could not be deleted. Ironically, I stopped doing that, because it messed my backups up. When running the backups as root, some tools would add the flag to the backuped files, but then later backups as non-root could not replace the file with new versions.

by lucb1e 7y ago

PureParadigm 7y ago

Right, that's why I said robust. But I'd push back against the idea that a normal user shouldn't be expected to have backups that are safe in such an event. If you want to guard against rogue software (or clumsy fingers in the terminal), you'll probably need to have remote backups. It sounds like copies on the cloud saved this user, and it's not unrealistic to suggest users backup to the cloud (I think many already do with OneDrive/iCloud/Dropbox). If you're a Linux user who likes to tinker, you can set up a Raspberry Pi with a hard drive attached and use restic over SFTP (or any of the other numerous choices).

lucb1e 7y ago
> I'd push back against the idea that a normal user shouldn't be expected to have backups that are safe in such an event. That is fair. I was commenting from the perspective of what is rather than what should be. Alongside making software as safe as possible, we should also be encouraging and expecting people to do this.
lonelappde 7y ago
Cloud is not backup! Rogue software can erase you cloud data too. You can't call Google or Dropbox and ask for last week's version of your cloud files.
- meribold 7y ago
  Agree about Google and Dropbox, but rsync.net has read-only snapshots so you can call them and ask for old files.
  - lucb1e 7y ago
    And Tarsnap. Not sure if rsync can do local encryption these days? So I guess 'for the paranoid' (as Tarsnap's tagline is), Tarsnap with write-only keys might be better.
  - rsync 7y ago
    This is correct. I can't speak to what you can do with google, but you can, in fact, call (or email) rsync.net and ask for old files. By old files, that can mean any snapshot schedule you choose to set up (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly ...).

benibela 7y ago

I used to set the append-only extended file attribute on important files No one can delete the files afterwards, not even root, without removing the attribute first It worked well with Mercurial, which is also append only. So I could commit as usually to my Mercurial repository, but it could not be deleted. Ironically, I stopped doing that, because it messed my backups up. When running the backups as root, some tools would add the flag to the backuped files, but then later backups as non-root could not replace the file with new versions.