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There are four times in my life I have suffered regrettable data loss incidents. The first was when the telephone pole outside our house was struck directly by

There are four times in my life I have suffered regrettable data loss incidents. The first was when the telephone pole outside our house was struck directly by lightning. Not only was it the loudest thing I have ever heard, the current surged through the telephone line, into the internal fax modem, and fries everything within its vicinity. I was 10. I did have backuos, but only only floppy and they didn't cover everything. The second was storing data in OneDrive - a change to their terms surrounding "lifetime" unlikely noted storage, combined with a client that was unusably slow to download and a deadline for data retrieval meant that I lost most of my files. The third was SD card failure in digital camera on holiday, the controller chip died catastrophically, leaving the card completely unrecognised. It was a brand new Sony 128GB card, manufactured by Toshiba, and it seemed to be a common issue. I now shoot to two cards simultaneously. And the fourth time was ... Performing a backup. An errant script deleted the source content, but I'd also deleted the existing backup to free up space for the new backup. I've been weary of using rewritable media for some time now as a consequence, but I think backups themselves are high risk activities.

Forgeties79 9d ago
>I now shoot 2 cards simultaneously A very lovely change over the last 8 years or so lol. I came up in film during the DSLR revolution. 5D2’s/7D’s/Rebels (i series) years. 8bit 420 nasty aliasing recording on single cards and praying baby. Magic lantern booted on those same SD’s!
- jeffbee 9d ago
  Mainstream DSLRs with dual card slots came out 22 years ago.
  - mrheosuper 9d ago
    Sadly after 22 years, it's still considered a "high-end" feature. Even on $1600 Fujifilm x100vi, there is still single SD slot.
    - dsego 9d ago
      I also have the same fuji. Digital cameras are still in the stone ages. I think Tony Northrup covered it well. Nothing has changed since digital cameras came to market, the workflow is still the same, copy files from a card to PC. They aren't connected to the internet, they don't have automatic syncing to cloud for backups or sharing, fuji doesn't even have a gps chip built in to store the location (only works if connected to a smartphone), they can't be locked via fingerprint scanner. It's all tech from 25 years ago.
      - podocarp 9d ago
        In some senses it's good. That feature list just says "use a smartphone then". No thank you. It's everything that a camera should not be. GPS is useful, but not wifi. I don't need my camera becoming another IOT always online telemetry device. They're one of the few electronic devices built to last. Imagine needing fingerprint unlock on a camera, and for what? Prevent others from viewing your photos? Changing your settings? Also copy from card to pc is the best possible workflow. Imagine cameras like smartphone with no expandable storage. Stop giving these people ideas! I am now very afraid they will listen to this guy since he actually has a follower base.
        justsomehnguy 9d ago
        > Also copy from card to pc is the best possible workflow So turn off the camera, open the memory card slot cover which is flimsy 1mm prong, eject the card, insert it in the reader (if you have SD reader) or fiddle the microSD first from the convertor and then insert, copy, (insert microSD to SD convertor), open up slot cover, insert the card. Surely beats just connecting the camera to the WiFi (which it does have anyway) and downloading through SMB. Suuure. S9900 from 15 years ago had a built-in GPS receiver (and absolutely unneeded and never updated POI system). P1100 needs a smartphone for GPS for whatever reason - and app doesn't work 5 times from 5. But the latter is on me, I knew what I would get when I bought Nikon.
        iririririr 9d ago
        why do you assume a functionality will obligatory be abused against the client? pro camera manufacturers are not google or apple. Have we became that defeatist?
  - jimmaswell 9d ago
    I would hope they have some feature for automatic backup to your phone over bluetooth or such today.
    - jeffbee 9d ago
      WiFi is a little faster I guess? In the primitive days people used the EyeFi.
      - jimmaswell 9d ago
        You would often not have wifi available, and you wouldn't want to have to type in wifi passwords to your camera all the time. But your phone will almost always be nearby and persistent bluetooth is easy.
        toast0 9d ago
        Wifi between your camera and the phone. Or your camera and a laptop in your bag or whatever...
        Gigachad 9d ago
        Problem is they have to disconnect from the current wifi ap to connect to the cameras ap which is inconvenient and means there can’t be a constant connection. Wifi NAN could be used to solve this problem but I’ve not seen anything using it. Apple only just added support last year though.
    - dsego 9d ago
      They do transfer, but it's not automatic.
      - robmccoll 9d ago
        My Nikon ZF transfers to my phone through Nikon's SnapBridge app automatically.
  - Forgeties79 9d ago
    That’s not true in the slightest. None of Canon’s 50D and up line, 7D line, 5D line, and rebel line did anywhere near that long ago. I did not shoot on Nikons back then but I imagine most of their fleet didn’t have dual slot recording either. You’d have to get high end pro gear until 10-12 years ago for it. The 5D3 was first, so that was like 12 or 13 years ago now. It rolled out after that over a few years across their fleet.
- Melatonic 9d ago
  Magic Lantern was awesome. I still have raw video sequences I shot on a 5D mkiii
  - Forgeties79 9d ago
    Can you even get the software to process it anymore? That was such an exciting time
cvhc 9d ago
> a change to their terms surrounding "lifetime" unlikely noted storage I had a similar experience with a Chinese cloud storage provider. They didn't even give a convenient way to export the data. And the client throttled download to like 100KB/s. I luckily was able to parallel download by running the client on several VMs... > An errant script deleted the source content, but I'd also deleted the existing backup to free up space for the new backup. Sounds like the backup workflow is fundamentally flawed... But I also have the fear that the backup program with root privileges can go off the rails... So I keep my backup job as simple as just running restic with some systemd restrictions.
Gigachad 9d ago
>I've been weary of using rewritable media for some time now as a consequence I briefly considered using bluray disks as a backup for my photos and other critical docs. But getting a decent bluray burner seems not so easy these days with most production winding down. Next best thing looks like the "object lock" feature on object store services that prevents deleting objects for a certain time.
- Terr_ 9d ago
  I pretty much instantly wrote off physical media because I know I won't reliably move it to a separate location. If I'm going to have backups, I want ones that are not within fire/flood range of my computer. In terms of preventing "oops" moments, I'm mainly relying on software (restic) for that, where I trust that (A) backups always append data rather than replacing and (B) it's logic works for marking which data to purge based on rules is accurate. [0] [0] https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/060_forget.html#removing-snapshots-according-to-a-policy https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/060_forget.html#remo...
  - Gigachad 9d ago
    You want to make sure the append only is enforced by the hosting provider rather than duplicity. Your backups should be resistant to having an attacker on the system who can run arbitrary commands with duplicity.
    - Terr_ 9d ago
      Right, defense against internal "oops" accidents looks rather different than defense against purposeful sabotage. While the local backup service uses an API-key with limited privileges, I need to go back to the bucket/storage-zone settings and see what I can enable, how it would affect total storage, and whether I (with additional privileges) can reliably grab the correct mix of old-blobs to do a restore.
- cyberax 9d ago
  I bought a tape library for my backups, but that's probably an overkill. On the other hand, LTO-5 drives are now pretty affordable. And each tape cartridge holds around 2Tb of data for about $20.
dsego 9d ago
For digital media we really need a good stable archival storage solution. Nothing on the market right now for ordinary people.
- torton 9d ago
  There's plenty of backup services and cloud solutions. The article mentions Borg and Restic, others like Backblaze are more consumer friendly. Which needs do you have that aren't met by any of these tools?
  - BetterThanSober 9d ago
    > backup services and cloud solutions online backup should not be your primary method of backup, you're one billing, identity theft, financial issue, or health issue away from getting your backup nuked do you have PBS clout? if not good luck https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/08/pbs-station-fears-losing-50tb-of-data-after-being-ghosted-by-cloud-storage-provider/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/08/pbs-s...
    - Gigachad 9d ago
      Online only is fine as an actual backup, presuming you have the primary in your control. It shouldn’t be the only copy of the data that exists.
    - mrngld 9d ago
      PBS's situation is entirely PBS fault. If you've got 50TB of data to backup it's either worth $300 to $400 a month to you to do it properly with a reputable vendor along with on-site storage, or ... just accept you'll lose it. It was such a tremendously silly decision I almost wonder if it wasn't a politically motivated decision. Maybe the provider that went under had some relative DEI points versus Backblaze or AWS. Just bizarre. But I wouldn't extrapolate anything out from their situation.
  - GTP 9d ago
    I'm using Backblaze, but as a Kopia repository.
BLKNSLVR 9d ago
OneDrive... So much fail in one single product.
- hulitu 9d ago
  It is made by Microsoft, the experts in this domain.
- sfn42 9d ago
  Man i absolutely hate how windows insists that my various personal folders need to be OneDrive and then complains that there's not enough space. I've tried to just disable/remove onedrive but if it's possible it's certainly not easy. I'm pretty sure there's a bunch of stuff I've lost due to the same thing the other guy described, limit was reduced and files just deleted. Either give me unlimited space or get out of my file system. They could have just made it a separate thing and let me put stuff in there if I wanted to, instead of hijacking my file system and just messing it up.
  - close04 9d ago
    I have the paid OD, and think I know what I'm doing, and still got burned on occasions, luckily with little consequence due to other mechanisms in place. But when I really didn't want to deal with OD's crap, I went all nuclear on it. Uninstall. When MS insisted to reinstall it, I replaced the executable and went for file system permissions. I twisted them so hard that even MS couldn't (or at least didn't try to) overwrite my fake OD executable. I stopped running Windows wherever I can not because the tools or OS are that bad but because a machine should come with sane defaults but should respect my wishes if I want to go against those defaults. When it starts to override me, it's not my machine anymore and whoever "owns" it (MS in this case) can shove it.
baxtr 9d ago
Since we’re talking about it: anyone backing up their iCloud photos? If so, how?
- mmazzarolo 9d ago
  I have a weird setup lol. I use a shared photos library with my partner (so that we have all family photos together) and have a MacBook Air that has Photos being download in raw quality and backups then via Time Machine on a Synology NAS. Plus, Synology photo sync on my iPhone (backing up on my NAS separately from Time Machine) AND Google Photos on my partner’s (syncing on Google Photos). Yes it’s horrible, just never had time to clean I up properly but I prefer to have them in multiple cloud locations and locally for now than optimise for having a clean setup.
- fragmede 9d ago
  Arq. https://www.arqbackup.com/ https://www.arqbackup.com/
- undebuggable 9d ago
  From iPhone into local machine through LocalSend or AirDrop, then your usual favorite backup pipeline.
  - mrngld 9d ago
    That's tedious. Can't believe nobody mentioned Parachute Backup yet. It had a moment in the sun earlier this year or last year when it first started getting traction. I have a Mac, so not just an iPhone, so I use Arq there, it materializes the iCloud stuff as necessary for backup. But if all you have is an iPhone or iPad along with an external disk, NAS or whatever, Parachute Backup will do backups to a variety of destinations.
- unanimous 9d ago
  When I was using Ubuntu, I would plug my phone into my laptop and run this small script: https://gist.github.com/wheelercj/8cce112fc8ee55fd4858847a526ff69f https://gist.github.com/wheelercj/8cce112fc8ee55fd4858847a52... It's mainly just rsync. When the phone was plugged in, the photos were accessible at a path like "/run/user/1000/gvfs/gphoto2:host=Apple_Inc._iPhone_abc123/". Now I use Time Machine, but I still need to check whether it includes iCloud photos.
lolakutty 9d ago
>I did have backuos, but only only floppy and they didn't cover everything. This made me remember the time during the 90s when I lost all my BASIC programs due to a hard disk crash, and seeing me sitting sad, my mother handed me a bunch of floppies and asked me to see if they contain something useful. And turned out that it had all the programs! I took the backups and forgot about that. Apparently that is one of the hard things with backups. You need to track them...
- fuzztester 8d ago
  metabackup? startup opportunity. oops ...
Dylan16807 9d ago
I would say you didn't get quite the right lesson from the fourth one. Rewritable devices are fine, but have (at least) one backup completely unplugged while you update another backup.
cirelli94 8d ago
> I now shoot to two cards simultaneously What kind of camera put shoots to two cards simultaneously? Edit: TIL about cameras equipped with dual memory card slots
runbookops 7d ago
[flagged]

Forgeties79 9d ago

>I now shoot 2 cards simultaneously A very lovely change over the last 8 years or so lol. I came up in film during the DSLR revolution. 5D2’s/7D’s/Rebels (i series) years. 8bit 420 nasty aliasing recording on single cards and praying baby. Magic lantern booted on those same SD’s!

jeffbee 9d ago
Mainstream DSLRs with dual card slots came out 22 years ago.
- mrheosuper 9d ago
  Sadly after 22 years, it's still considered a "high-end" feature. Even on $1600 Fujifilm x100vi, there is still single SD slot.
  - dsego 9d ago
    I also have the same fuji. Digital cameras are still in the stone ages. I think Tony Northrup covered it well. Nothing has changed since digital cameras came to market, the workflow is still the same, copy files from a card to PC. They aren't connected to the internet, they don't have automatic syncing to cloud for backups or sharing, fuji doesn't even have a gps chip built in to store the location (only works if connected to a smartphone), they can't be locked via fingerprint scanner. It's all tech from 25 years ago.
    - podocarp 9d ago
      In some senses it's good. That feature list just says "use a smartphone then". No thank you. It's everything that a camera should not be. GPS is useful, but not wifi. I don't need my camera becoming another IOT always online telemetry device. They're one of the few electronic devices built to last. Imagine needing fingerprint unlock on a camera, and for what? Prevent others from viewing your photos? Changing your settings? Also copy from card to pc is the best possible workflow. Imagine cameras like smartphone with no expandable storage. Stop giving these people ideas! I am now very afraid they will listen to this guy since he actually has a follower base.
      - justsomehnguy 9d ago
        > Also copy from card to pc is the best possible workflow So turn off the camera, open the memory card slot cover which is flimsy 1mm prong, eject the card, insert it in the reader (if you have SD reader) or fiddle the microSD first from the convertor and then insert, copy, (insert microSD to SD convertor), open up slot cover, insert the card. Surely beats just connecting the camera to the WiFi (which it does have anyway) and downloading through SMB. Suuure. S9900 from 15 years ago had a built-in GPS receiver (and absolutely unneeded and never updated POI system). P1100 needs a smartphone for GPS for whatever reason - and app doesn't work 5 times from 5. But the latter is on me, I knew what I would get when I bought Nikon.
      - iririririr 9d ago
        why do you assume a functionality will obligatory be abused against the client? pro camera manufacturers are not google or apple. Have we became that defeatist?
- jimmaswell 9d ago
  I would hope they have some feature for automatic backup to your phone over bluetooth or such today.
  - jeffbee 9d ago
    WiFi is a little faster I guess? In the primitive days people used the EyeFi.
    - jimmaswell 9d ago
      You would often not have wifi available, and you wouldn't want to have to type in wifi passwords to your camera all the time. But your phone will almost always be nearby and persistent bluetooth is easy.
      - toast0 9d ago
        Wifi between your camera and the phone. Or your camera and a laptop in your bag or whatever...
        Gigachad 9d ago
        Problem is they have to disconnect from the current wifi ap to connect to the cameras ap which is inconvenient and means there can’t be a constant connection. Wifi NAN could be used to solve this problem but I’ve not seen anything using it. Apple only just added support last year though.
  - dsego 9d ago
    They do transfer, but it's not automatic.
    - robmccoll 9d ago
      My Nikon ZF transfers to my phone through Nikon's SnapBridge app automatically.
- Forgeties79 9d ago
  That’s not true in the slightest. None of Canon’s 50D and up line, 7D line, 5D line, and rebel line did anywhere near that long ago. I did not shoot on Nikons back then but I imagine most of their fleet didn’t have dual slot recording either. You’d have to get high end pro gear until 10-12 years ago for it. The 5D3 was first, so that was like 12 or 13 years ago now. It rolled out after that over a few years across their fleet.
Melatonic 9d ago
Magic Lantern was awesome. I still have raw video sequences I shot on a 5D mkiii
- Forgeties79 9d ago
  Can you even get the software to process it anymore? That was such an exciting time

cvhc 9d ago

> a change to their terms surrounding "lifetime" unlikely noted storage I had a similar experience with a Chinese cloud storage provider. They didn't even give a convenient way to export the data. And the client throttled download to like 100KB/s. I luckily was able to parallel download by running the client on several VMs... > An errant script deleted the source content, but I'd also deleted the existing backup to free up space for the new backup. Sounds like the backup workflow is fundamentally flawed... But I also have the fear that the backup program with root privileges can go off the rails... So I keep my backup job as simple as just running restic with some systemd restrictions.

Gigachad 9d ago

>I've been weary of using rewritable media for some time now as a consequence I briefly considered using bluray disks as a backup for my photos and other critical docs. But getting a decent bluray burner seems not so easy these days with most production winding down. Next best thing looks like the "object lock" feature on object store services that prevents deleting objects for a certain time.

Terr_ 9d ago
I pretty much instantly wrote off physical media because I know I won't reliably move it to a separate location. If I'm going to have backups, I want ones that are not within fire/flood range of my computer. In terms of preventing "oops" moments, I'm mainly relying on software (restic) for that, where I trust that (A) backups always append data rather than replacing and (B) it's logic works for marking which data to purge based on rules is accurate. [0] [0] https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/060_forget.html#removing-snapshots-according-to-a-policy https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/060_forget.html#remo...
- Gigachad 9d ago
  You want to make sure the append only is enforced by the hosting provider rather than duplicity. Your backups should be resistant to having an attacker on the system who can run arbitrary commands with duplicity.
  - Terr_ 9d ago
    Right, defense against internal "oops" accidents looks rather different than defense against purposeful sabotage. While the local backup service uses an API-key with limited privileges, I need to go back to the bucket/storage-zone settings and see what I can enable, how it would affect total storage, and whether I (with additional privileges) can reliably grab the correct mix of old-blobs to do a restore.
cyberax 9d ago
I bought a tape library for my backups, but that's probably an overkill. On the other hand, LTO-5 drives are now pretty affordable. And each tape cartridge holds around 2Tb of data for about $20.

dsego 9d ago

For digital media we really need a good stable archival storage solution. Nothing on the market right now for ordinary people.

torton 9d ago
There's plenty of backup services and cloud solutions. The article mentions Borg and Restic, others like Backblaze are more consumer friendly. Which needs do you have that aren't met by any of these tools?
- BetterThanSober 9d ago
  > backup services and cloud solutions online backup should not be your primary method of backup, you're one billing, identity theft, financial issue, or health issue away from getting your backup nuked do you have PBS clout? if not good luck https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/08/pbs-station-fears-losing-50tb-of-data-after-being-ghosted-by-cloud-storage-provider/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/08/pbs-s...
  - Gigachad 9d ago
    Online only is fine as an actual backup, presuming you have the primary in your control. It shouldn’t be the only copy of the data that exists.
  - mrngld 9d ago
    PBS's situation is entirely PBS fault. If you've got 50TB of data to backup it's either worth $300 to $400 a month to you to do it properly with a reputable vendor along with on-site storage, or ... just accept you'll lose it. It was such a tremendously silly decision I almost wonder if it wasn't a politically motivated decision. Maybe the provider that went under had some relative DEI points versus Backblaze or AWS. Just bizarre. But I wouldn't extrapolate anything out from their situation.
- GTP 9d ago
  I'm using Backblaze, but as a Kopia repository.

BLKNSLVR 9d ago

OneDrive... So much fail in one single product.

hulitu 9d ago
It is made by Microsoft, the experts in this domain.
sfn42 9d ago
Man i absolutely hate how windows insists that my various personal folders need to be OneDrive and then complains that there's not enough space. I've tried to just disable/remove onedrive but if it's possible it's certainly not easy. I'm pretty sure there's a bunch of stuff I've lost due to the same thing the other guy described, limit was reduced and files just deleted. Either give me unlimited space or get out of my file system. They could have just made it a separate thing and let me put stuff in there if I wanted to, instead of hijacking my file system and just messing it up.
- close04 9d ago
  I have the paid OD, and think I know what I'm doing, and still got burned on occasions, luckily with little consequence due to other mechanisms in place. But when I really didn't want to deal with OD's crap, I went all nuclear on it. Uninstall. When MS insisted to reinstall it, I replaced the executable and went for file system permissions. I twisted them so hard that even MS couldn't (or at least didn't try to) overwrite my fake OD executable. I stopped running Windows wherever I can not because the tools or OS are that bad but because a machine should come with sane defaults but should respect my wishes if I want to go against those defaults. When it starts to override me, it's not my machine anymore and whoever "owns" it (MS in this case) can shove it.

baxtr 9d ago

Since we’re talking about it: anyone backing up their iCloud photos? If so, how?

mmazzarolo 9d ago
I have a weird setup lol. I use a shared photos library with my partner (so that we have all family photos together) and have a MacBook Air that has Photos being download in raw quality and backups then via Time Machine on a Synology NAS. Plus, Synology photo sync on my iPhone (backing up on my NAS separately from Time Machine) AND Google Photos on my partner’s (syncing on Google Photos). Yes it’s horrible, just never had time to clean I up properly but I prefer to have them in multiple cloud locations and locally for now than optimise for having a clean setup.
fragmede 9d ago
Arq. https://www.arqbackup.com/ https://www.arqbackup.com/
undebuggable 9d ago
From iPhone into local machine through LocalSend or AirDrop, then your usual favorite backup pipeline.
- mrngld 9d ago
  That's tedious. Can't believe nobody mentioned Parachute Backup yet. It had a moment in the sun earlier this year or last year when it first started getting traction. I have a Mac, so not just an iPhone, so I use Arq there, it materializes the iCloud stuff as necessary for backup. But if all you have is an iPhone or iPad along with an external disk, NAS or whatever, Parachute Backup will do backups to a variety of destinations.
unanimous 9d ago
When I was using Ubuntu, I would plug my phone into my laptop and run this small script: https://gist.github.com/wheelercj/8cce112fc8ee55fd4858847a526ff69f https://gist.github.com/wheelercj/8cce112fc8ee55fd4858847a52... It's mainly just rsync. When the phone was plugged in, the photos were accessible at a path like "/run/user/1000/gvfs/gphoto2:host=Apple_Inc._iPhone_abc123/". Now I use Time Machine, but I still need to check whether it includes iCloud photos.

lolakutty 9d ago

>I did have backuos, but only only floppy and they didn't cover everything. This made me remember the time during the 90s when I lost all my BASIC programs due to a hard disk crash, and seeing me sitting sad, my mother handed me a bunch of floppies and asked me to see if they contain something useful. And turned out that it had all the programs! I took the backups and forgot about that. Apparently that is one of the hard things with backups. You need to track them...

fuzztester 8d ago
metabackup? startup opportunity. oops ...

Dylan16807 9d ago

I would say you didn't get quite the right lesson from the fourth one. Rewritable devices are fine, but have (at least) one backup completely unplugged while you update another backup.

cirelli94 8d ago

> I now shoot to two cards simultaneously What kind of camera put shoots to two cards simultaneously? Edit: TIL about cameras equipped with dual memory card slots

runbookops 7d ago

[flagged]