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Yesterday, All those backups seemed a waste of pay. Now my database has gone away. Oh I believe in yesterday. Suddenly, There's not half the files there used t

by dusted 3y ago

Yesterday, All those backups seemed a waste of pay. Now my database has gone away. Oh I believe in yesterday. Suddenly, There's not half the files there used to be, And there's a milestone hanging over me The system crashed so suddenly. I pushed something wrong What it was I could not say. Now all my data's gone and I long for yesterday-ay-ay-ay. Yesterday, The need for back-ups seemed so far away. I knew my data was all here to stay, Now I believe in yesterday. -- From usenet My comment on the situation: Online mirrors are fine, but calling them backup is a stretch of the imagination,since you must assume that an event can compromise all data within a domain (be it The Internet, or a physical location). A true backup must be physically and logically separate.

Ekaros 3y ago
Also temporally separated. That is you must have backup that is beyond attackers time horizon. This is only way to get back at least something.
- dusted 3y ago
  Absolutely!
- westernpopular 3y ago
  What does time horizon mean?
  - chrisandchris 3y ago
    An attacker may intrude your environment and slowly destroy data without you realizing. If this process takes e.g. 10 days, you need backups for 11 days to be safe. This scenario happens often (as far as I know) with ransomare attacks (on personal devices): Encrypt least used documents first. Probably noone will realize it over weeks that data "is gone".
soco 3y ago
Which is why we have the 3-2-1 rule, not only for business but also for personal data: https://www.veeam.com/blog/321-backup-rule.html https://www.veeam.com/blog/321-backup-rule.html Otherwise I agree, they are not "backups", just maybe a glorified copy.
- permo-w 3y ago
  there are stronger backups and there are weaker backups, but as long as the intention is for an informational failsafe, they're all still backups. arbitrarily deciding what forms are "true" or "not true" or a "glorified copy" seems a bit silly to me. the world is just a bit more complex than that what is a backup if not just a form of copy anyway?
nurettin 3y ago
> A true backup must be physically and logically separate. That doesn't stop it from being targeted by hackers. No amount of hindsight will save your backups unless they are in an offline cold storage somewhere protected by men-at-arms.
tommiegannert 3y ago
Online mirrors are fine if they have boundaries that make them very certainly append-only. Opening up scp/rsync and saying "our client only writes new files" is bad. Using a dedicated stream-writing interface over TLS is probably fine. As for the other attack vector: segregating the admin credentials so that the stream-writing interface cannot be bypassed, yeah, fun. 2FA only gets you so far.

by dusted 3y ago

Ekaros 3y ago

Also temporally separated. That is you must have backup that is beyond attackers time horizon. This is only way to get back at least something.

dusted 3y ago
Absolutely!
westernpopular 3y ago
What does time horizon mean?
- chrisandchris 3y ago
  An attacker may intrude your environment and slowly destroy data without you realizing. If this process takes e.g. 10 days, you need backups for 11 days to be safe. This scenario happens often (as far as I know) with ransomare attacks (on personal devices): Encrypt least used documents first. Probably noone will realize it over weeks that data "is gone".

soco 3y ago

Which is why we have the 3-2-1 rule, not only for business but also for personal data: https://www.veeam.com/blog/321-backup-rule.html https://www.veeam.com/blog/321-backup-rule.html Otherwise I agree, they are not "backups", just maybe a glorified copy.

permo-w 3y ago
there are stronger backups and there are weaker backups, but as long as the intention is for an informational failsafe, they're all still backups. arbitrarily deciding what forms are "true" or "not true" or a "glorified copy" seems a bit silly to me. the world is just a bit more complex than that what is a backup if not just a form of copy anyway?

nurettin 3y ago

> A true backup must be physically and logically separate. That doesn't stop it from being targeted by hackers. No amount of hindsight will save your backups unless they are in an offline cold storage somewhere protected by men-at-arms.

tommiegannert 3y ago

Online mirrors are fine if they have boundaries that make them very certainly append-only. Opening up scp/rsync and saying "our client only writes new files" is bad. Using a dedicated stream-writing interface over TLS is probably fine. As for the other attack vector: segregating the admin credentials so that the stream-writing interface cannot be bypassed, yeah, fun. 2FA only gets you so far.