Keep everything local is a great strategy until your house burns down or your hard drive or SSD decides to end it’s own life.
I’m not saying that you should use one drive. I’m saying that you should have backups. If all you can get is cloud storage, then one drive might fit the bill. Maybe it won’t. I don’t know you or what you want from a backup.
I back up my files to a NAS on my lan, but I also use one drive and Google drive when I need to.
All I’m trying to say is: one drive isn’t necessarily the worst option. Raw dogging a single local storage drive as your only copy of the data you’re trying to hold onto, is much worse than one drive.
Other than that, I’ll just reiterate: back up your shit. And I want to add, check your bitlocker to see if it’s on. If it is, back up your recovery key to somewhere safe. Bitlocker, in and of itself isn’t a bad thing. I would argue that it’s best practice to have some kind of FDE, and bitlocker can achieve that. Just back up the recovery key, for the love of God.
Pro tip. “Print” the recovery to a PDF, then email that file to yourself. Quick and easy. The option to save your recovery key to a file, will not allow that file to be saved to the drive that it unlocks, but if you print it, you can save it as PDF without the same limitations. Just don’t leave it on the encrypted drive. Literally put it anywhere else. A USB drive, a NAS, an email, cloud storage, whatever you like. I’m not your boss.
Save yourself a metric fuckton of work, and/or lost data; back to your shit.
In my possession are two, what I’ll call “master” drives. Two 16TB hard drives, exact clones of each other. They hold the bulk media, old photos, an entire library of books, backups with full emulator and rom sets, games, movies, series, Wikipedia backups, encyclopedias, cookbooks, plant guides, carpentry, mechanics, howtos, compressed into the tiniest dots my processor can manage.
Aside from being a backup for my personal files and configurations, It’s essentially an arc of knowledge for societal collapse, granted laser-focused around what I find important, but still, important to someone.
My cousin, who I consider my brother, has a copy of this drive in a small, foam-padded pelican case in his closet. He keeps it for me just in case of a house fire, displacement, or any dangerous situation that renders any of the data at my actual home inaccessible.
While the drives aren’t a perfect clone of my network’s configurations as-is, that backup runs locally, the drives are 80% of the content I serve and would get me 80% of the way back to complete if anything ever happened. They would individually be invaluable if anything ever happened here or I had a Donnie Darko situation, especially if it’s some authoritarian hellscape and the content isn’t even available anymore.
Btw if you aren’t ramping up your data collection due to the Trump goings on, you better be. Download EVERYTHING.
Keep everything local is a great strategy until your house burns down or your hard drive or SSD decides to end it’s own life.
I’m not saying that you should use one drive. I’m saying that you should have backups. If all you can get is cloud storage, then one drive might fit the bill. Maybe it won’t. I don’t know you or what you want from a backup.
I back up my files to a NAS on my lan, but I also use one drive and Google drive when I need to.
All I’m trying to say is: one drive isn’t necessarily the worst option. Raw dogging a single local storage drive as your only copy of the data you’re trying to hold onto, is much worse than one drive.
Other than that, I’ll just reiterate: back up your shit. And I want to add, check your bitlocker to see if it’s on. If it is, back up your recovery key to somewhere safe. Bitlocker, in and of itself isn’t a bad thing. I would argue that it’s best practice to have some kind of FDE, and bitlocker can achieve that. Just back up the recovery key, for the love of God.
Pro tip. “Print” the recovery to a PDF, then email that file to yourself. Quick and easy. The option to save your recovery key to a file, will not allow that file to be saved to the drive that it unlocks, but if you print it, you can save it as PDF without the same limitations. Just don’t leave it on the encrypted drive. Literally put it anywhere else. A USB drive, a NAS, an email, cloud storage, whatever you like. I’m not your boss.
Save yourself a metric fuckton of work, and/or lost data; back to your shit.
In my possession are two, what I’ll call “master” drives. Two 16TB hard drives, exact clones of each other. They hold the bulk media, old photos, an entire library of books, backups with full emulator and rom sets, games, movies, series, Wikipedia backups, encyclopedias, cookbooks, plant guides, carpentry, mechanics, howtos, compressed into the tiniest dots my processor can manage.
Aside from being a backup for my personal files and configurations, It’s essentially an arc of knowledge for societal collapse, granted laser-focused around what I find important, but still, important to someone.
My cousin, who I consider my brother, has a copy of this drive in a small, foam-padded pelican case in his closet. He keeps it for me just in case of a house fire, displacement, or any dangerous situation that renders any of the data at my actual home inaccessible.
While the drives aren’t a perfect clone of my network’s configurations as-is, that backup runs locally, the drives are 80% of the content I serve and would get me 80% of the way back to complete if anything ever happened. They would individually be invaluable if anything ever happened here or I had a Donnie Darko situation, especially if it’s some authoritarian hellscape and the content isn’t even available anymore.
Btw if you aren’t ramping up your data collection due to the Trump goings on, you better be. Download EVERYTHING.
NOW.
RIGHT NOW.
I just have an extra server at a family member’s house and planing on having another at a different location