Lost all my data and it's my fault

I've been "staging" data onto a 12tb external drive for a few months in preparation for building a more robust system. In the back of my mind I knew that if I didn't have a backup of this and something happened all is lost and I was truly an idiot.

Now that I've got the idiocy out of the way, my roommate plugged in the drive as she decided it would be a nice idea to clean up my desk and such. She called me saying she smelled burning plastic and shutdown my systems.

I came home to find the external drive smelling of burnt plastic and my heart sank. It would not power on, I pulled it out of the encloure and connected it to a usb sata cable and power source and it would not come on. So essentially I lost everything.

This is my fault for not having backups and allowing other people to touch my gear. So I've learned my lesson.

I'm working to recover everything that I actually cared about (maybe 2-3tb out of the full disk I cared about).

Moving forward. I don't know that spending 2k on a NAS is going to do me any good as the NAS is not a replacement for backups.

I'm trying to come up with a new system (to me) for backups/archiving.

Here's what I used to have.

1 x external usb drive encrypted with Luks, data within is client-side encrypted with restic for multiple sources. This works fine for me and I've got my restic and luks head keys backed up (like that, huh? lol).

I'm likely going to go with this same method, but I'm thinking this time I'll figure out a way to have a second drive of the same size that either is a restic target so all backups and archives are duplicated as they are archived or figure out a way to do this to where drive A is somehow mirrored to drive B when it's not archiving. I'm not sure if this is possible or the best way to do this.

If you were starting over and had the budget for say 2-3 big external drives what would you recommend?

I know I am also going to be using something like B2 with encryption as a point of last resort backup solution (encrypted client side again). But for now I'm focusing on physical media.

Thanks for your help. I expect to be flamed for this post, but trust me I've learned my lesson and was idiot-taxes

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11 comments

just don't fall into the typical trap:

I am brave, backup is for losers

I lost everything, I must do the perfect backup setup in the world

I still on a way to design my ultimate backup solution

I lost everything again because my amazing multilevel backup setup missed one link and it did nothing for months without realizing that

Just get a simple external drive and use one software that you know well. It means that you previously tested, and you are familiar with its working and recovery methods. Add some monitoring, best if the backup software can send emails.

When you have this base layer, then you can think about extending it to cloud, multiple locations, etc. First just do an easy simple stable reliable solution.

Multiple levels of encryption is useless, it just makes the system more complicated and error-prone. Either trust in the encryption built-in to the backup software, or do not use any application level encryption and use disk-level method.

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