My laptop was stolen on Thursday.....

Sandman

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agraham said:
I already said

"If I leave the house one goes with me."

EDIT: And if I'm out for more than a day another one goes in the outbuilding as well.
Click to expand...
Sorry, I should have been clearer. What if the fire start with you home and you run out to save yourself, and are unable to grab a drive on the way out?
 
B

beelze69

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Hi,

What is a spinning rust ?
 

agraham

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Sandman said:
What if the fire start with you home and you run out to save yourself,
Click to expand...
Theoretically I should take one drive out to to one of our outbuildings after each backup so I have an offsite backup like we did at work, but as I am lazy and that occurrence is a very low percentage I'll just take a calculated chance on it not happening.
 
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WhiteWizard

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Sorry for you'r lost, I live with that fear my selft, nowadays modern laptops from top vendors include a sleep routine in BIOS that can track the location of your device. It even survives a hard disk change, or a complete Windows reinstallation, Absolute is the creator of such a routine, of course you have to buy the service anually but it's cheap.
 

Magma

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What if...

the drive is on fire ??? Also your NAS... from router through lan cables... 0.01% (I ve seen that)...

I am sure, that in this case, you must go play a lucky game, to win millions of $$$$

But... ofcourse is good taking backups at least new snapshots every month... and changes every week... and why not everyday... if work is much... at external drive, preferably taking away from the office (or home)...
Latest I am taking backup at cloud drives too... but i always encrypting my data... i also prefering making different snapshots for different versions, or general different days - backups... (not replacing, but cycling at least 7 different backups)...

In some clients have batch, 7 different days - with 2, 3 ways (NAS Backup, usb, dvd-recording, cloud, ftp, internal disk drive, external disk)
 

techknight

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Yikes, been down this road before with not just theft but also sudden HDD Failures in my early years

Thats why these days I keep two on-site, and two off-site backup drives that are all mirrors of each other. 2 of the 4 drives are for work related activities, and the other two are home/personal backups, archives. Got stuff that dates back to at least 2000 when i first started backing things up to like Zip disks and CD-Rs before moving to physical drives.

I know that doesnt help you now, but you gotta have some type of backup system in place.

I am cynical and I dont trust the cloud as far as I can throw it so none of my stuff touches the cloud. Especially sourcecode. Too many data breaches these days.

Also for work related laptops, keep some type of MDM in place or Computrace or something so you can signal a remote wipe once it comes back online because it will, thatll protect the code you did lose. OR Meshcentral the box so you can remotely get in, download your code, and then wipe it.

Edit: Oh and also, my backup drives are also encrypted with truecrypt/veracrypt so if someone did steal one of them, they get nothing (it has happened)
 
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M

Mahares

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Johan Schoeman said:
All my B4A and B4J stuff are gone
Click to expand...
So much of your B4A and B4J work still resides in the forums thanks to the vast contributions you made to B4X over the years. You can recover much of it from the forum or make an arrangement with Erel to have a repository for you to recover. This link has so many of your libs, examples, snippets, tutorials, classes, etc.

Johan's Overview

Libraries & Tutorials/Examples: Graphing / Charting Libraries 35. AndroidCharts - Pie Chart & Bar Chart & Line Chart 36. desCharts - Bar Charts, Line Charts, Stacked Bar Charts, Stacked Line Charts 37. MPAndroidCharts - Radar Charts, Pie Charts, Vertical Bar Charts, Horizontal Bar Charts, Line...
www.b4x.com
 

JackKirk

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techknight said:
I am cynical and I dont trust the cloud as far as I can throw it so none of my stuff touches the cloud. Especially sourcecode. Too many data breaches these days.
Click to expand...
Cloud offers the "easy" "off-site" component of a comprehensive backup regime.

However, nothing IT related is bulletproof - including any component of a backup regime - be it cloud or a USB stick in your pocket - all you can do is:

⦁ make the effort required on the part of the miscreant enormous - FRUSTRATE.
⦁ make any rewards from such efforts miniscule - MINIMIZE.
⦁ have in place comprehensive intrusion detection mechanisms - MONITOR.

I have been using AWS for the last 6 years.

I use various S3 buckets for my major project data and a separate one for backups.

Backups are 7-zip volumes that are password encrypted - I realize this is not unbreakable but it is the last line of defense - FRUSTRATE/MINIMIZE.

I have fully deployed the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service on all my S3 buckets - FRUSTRATE.

I have implemented Server Access Logging on all my S3 buckets and have written a monitor (in B4J) that regularly automatically scans all such logs for any suspicious activity and reports same via alert SMSs to my phone - MONITOR.

On average I am getting about 1 alert a day on my major project data bucket - always some miscreant in a ...stan somewhere trying to get a listing of the contents - and always denied because they don't know the IAM credentials.
 

jmon

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I'd like to remind everyone of the bad stories related to cloud storage (https://www.engadget.com/2014-10-13-dropbox-selective-sync-bug.html) where people were using Dropbox (or other cloud storage) as their workspace. A bug on their side can wipe all data by mistake, it happened to a friend of mine.

So I guess a good solution is to have 2 backups on different cloud storage providers?

In my case I also have a NAS located into a shared rental space. I do daily backups there via internet.
 

JackKirk

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jmon said:
I'd like to remind everyone of the bad stories related to cloud storage
Click to expand...
First line of that article:

Cautious types will frequently tell you not to rely on cloud storage as your only backup

Which is why I have (effectively) 5 different backups - using a variety of storage hardware - including "spinning rust" (my NAS).

I should also add I have had zero problems with AWS S3 - but I have fully (?) invested in their security capabilities.
 
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tchart

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That was 10 years ago. I think you have more chance of having your laptop stolen than your files being deleted from the cloud.

Anyway I use GoodSync to sync to my Synology NAS which then sync with multiple cloud providers.
 

Jmu5667

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I do the same
 

BlueVision

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Johan, I am really sorry that you have been hit so badly. No one is 100% protected against such events. It's not the loss of the hardware itself that's bad, but the loss of solutions to problems that have grown and been painstakingly worked out over the years.
As sad as it is, the number of responses also shows us that we could all be affected by this problem at some point and finally need a functioning solution.

Personally, I programme on a highly upgraded T430 laptop from Lenovo with a 4-core I5. This laptop still has a large number of integrated interfaces, including an SD card slot. There is always an SD card in this slot, and a batch script automatically creates a kind of incremental backup when Windows is started. So you don't have to worry about anything.
Of course, this is no solution against theft or house fires. But at least it is a help if you have to reset a project because you have programmed in the wrong direction or the hard drive has died. Besides, this solution runs in the background and does not have to be triggered. You can forget about it once in a while.

My idea along these lines: Why not see this as an opportunity? Maybe Erel will read my post and start a new challenge. When you're not in the middle of a project or in such dire straits as my good friend Johan, programmers are looking for new ideas and tasks to sink their teeth into and keep their brains busy.

My suggestion: Let's create a challenge or start a joint open project! Everyone who likes can participate. Let's programme the "ultimate" backup software for our needs. With this forum, we have a place for exchange, enough old hands who know the intricacies, enough "newbies" who can learn a lot from it and in the end we all have something from it.

The programme should meet the following requirements (without claiming to be complete):
- independent backup, without having to start the backup manually
- Simultaneous backup on several freely configurable media (SD card, USB stick, NAS, cloud)
- Incremental principle with freely selectable retention period
- Compression of the backed-up data
- encryption protection
- free solution that is not linked to other platforms and service providers

Preferably (I think we all programme more or less on a Windows PC), this would be a solution with B4J.

It's probably not a big incentive for you, but I'm attaching my batch script to this post. The script is not witchcraft and should be transparent and changeable for everyone. It offers a certain minimum protection against data loss in the event of a disk crash, nothing more, and is only intended as a suggestion. Over the years, this script has proven itself to me.
This is going a bit too far here in Johan's thread and won't help him himself. Just think about it...

BV

Small Batch Script: 
robocopy e:/Backup/08 e:/Backup/09 /mir
robocopy e:/Backup/07 e:/Backup/08 /mir
robocopy e:/Backup/06 e:/Backup/07 /mir
robocopy e:/Backup/05 e:/Backup/06 /mir
robocopy e:/Backup/04 e:/Backup/05 /mir
robocopy e:/Backup/03 e:/Backup/04 /mir
robocopy e:/Backup/02 e:/Backup/03 /mir
robocopy e:/Backup/01 e:/Backup/02 /mir
robocopy c:/B4A e:/Backup/01/B4A /mir
robocopy c:/B4J e:/Backup/01/B4J /mir
robocopy c:/B4X e:/Backup/01/B4X /mir
robocopy c:/B4XHelp e:/Backup/01/B4XHelp /mir
exit
 

MrKim

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Heard this 40 years ago:
Question: How often should you back up?
Answer: How much are you willing to lose?
And thanks for the reminder, I just did a backup?
 
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