#Import Backup Data

[virtualizationhowto]

BDRSuite v7.0.0 GA Released New Features

BDRSuite v7.0.0 GA Released New Features #VembuBDRSuitev7.0.0GARelease #BackupandRecoverySoftware #KVMBackup #AzureBackup #AWSBackup #PostgreSQLBackup #FileShareBackup #TwoFactorAuthentication #ImportBackupData #PrePostBackupScripts #FileLevelRecovery

Vembu Technologies has recently unveiled the latest BDRSuite v7.0.0 GA, introducing many new features. This release has many new features and enhancements for comprehensive backup and recovery capabilities. Let’s look at BDRSuite v7.0.0 GA and the new features it contains. Table of contentsWhat is BDRSuite?Free version for home lab environmentsOverview of the new featuresKVM Backup and…

[imjustalazycat]

Chapter 1

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[silvermoon424]

what's the most important piece of advice you could give someone who's getting into downloading media (piracy, archiving, whatever)?

For the love of God, MAKE BACKUPS. I had to learn this lesson the hard way as a teenager when my external hard drive crashed and I couldn't pay the data recovery fee (which would have been a few hundred dollars, if it even worked).

Have backups. Have backups of your backups. To give you an idea of what my data and backup setup is:

My laptop: two backups (physical backup via external hard drive and automatic cloud backup via BackBlaze)

My media collection: three sources/backups (two external hard drives and a NAS [network attached storage system] with a failsafe measure because it has two hard drives; I will most likely look into cloud-based backup as well).

If you've noticed, I not only have a backup of all my data, I also have backups of backups. When it comes to your precious data, you seriously can't be too careful. I would recommend at least investing in one physical backup option as well as a cloud-based one (like BackBlaze).

[running-in-the-dark]

got a new hard drive (had to, no space left 😔), so I'm using that as a reason to completely reorganise my files (mostly shows, movies etc)

I'm having such a good time 💖

[whispering-kavka]

the struggles of today proved to me that i might indeed be a little mentally unwell

[artsietango]

This Google Drive AI scraping bullshit actually makes me want to cry. My entire life is packed into Google Drive. All of my writing over the years, all of my academic documents, everything.

I’m just so overwhelmed with all the shit I’m going to have to move. I’m lucky to have Scrivener, but online data storage has been super important as I’ve had so many shitty computers, and the only reason I haven’t lost work is because Google Drive has been my backup storage unit.

My partner has recommended gitlab to move my files to - it seems useful, and I can try and explain more about what it is and how it works when I get more familiar with it. I’m unsure if it’s a text editor, or can work that way. He was explaining something about the version history that I don’t quite understand right now but might later. I’m just super overwhelmed and frustrated that this is the dystopia we live in right now.

[ms-demeanor]

For those who are not aware: Bitlocker is encryption software, it encrypts your computer and makes it impossible to access the information on the computer unless you have the key.

It should be standard practice for IT companies to document the bitlocker keys as they are configuring bitlocker on a computer; generally you would do this by creating a record in your client management software for that specific device and putting the key in the record. Sometimes software can be used to extract that information in the event that it's necessary, but even if there's theoretically a way to extract the key, it should be documented somewhere *other* than on the encrypted computer.

This is something that a lot of IT people fuck up on kind of a lot (we've definitely had problems with missing bitlocker keys and I'm quite happy that the people who didn't document those keys aren't my coworkers anymore).

So what do you do if you want to use encryption software and you're NOT an IT company using a remote management tool that might be able to snag the keys?

When you are setting up encryption, put the encryption key in your password manager. Put it in your password manager. Document the important information that you cannot lose in your password manager. Your password manager is a good place to keep important things like your device encryption key, which you do not want lost or stolen. (If you run your password manager locally on an encrypted computer, export the data every once in a while, save it as an encrypted file, and put the file on your backup drive; you are going to have a bad time if your computer that hosts the only copies of your passwords shits the bed so *make a backup*)

This is my tip for home users for any kind of important recovery codes or software product keys: Print out the key and put it in your underwear drawer. Keep it there with your backup drive. That way you've got your important (small) computer shit in one place that is NOT your computer and is not likely to get shifted around and lost (the way that papers in desks often get shifted around and lost).

[xeneric-shrooms]

This phone business is so stressful

[alianoralacanta]

This is also necessary for any business accounts, bookmark lists, personal records and anything else connected with your creativity, business or general well-being.

Unsolicited Writing Advice

Completely random reminder to back up your work, especially if you're a writer, IF or game developer, coder, or creator of any kind. People sometimes ask me what my advice for other writers is, and I always forget to include this one, but it's one of the most important things, especially if your career, livelihood, or long-form projects hinge on writing in any way! Take it from someone who just had two backup methods fail unexpectedly and only the third backup prevented me from losing a solid month of work, you need to back up your work in as many ways as you possibly can. It may seem like a pain in the ass at the time, but I've seen a lot of games or stories stall or fail completely due to a catastrophic loss of data that utterly kills any drive to keep going with the project because of the need to start over. I'M BEGGING YOU, BACK UP YOUR DATA.

I recommend having at least 2, ideally 3 methods of backup:

Automatic cloud storage. I personally prefer working with Dropbox, where every change I save is automatically synced and backed up to a cloud server as well as natively saved on my own device. It also has robust version history, so if you figure out you've done something horrific and unknowingly saved over something important or rewritten a section you weren't supposed to, you can rewind everything in a folder down to a specific minute (over the last 30 days): a feature that has saved my hide just a few too many times for comfort. A free Dropbox account gives you 2 GB of storage to work with. Working within Google Drive works just as well, and the free version gives you 15 GB of storage (though that's shared between your email account and other Google apps, as well)! However, I don't believe it provides automatic syncing and backup the same way Dropbox does: you either have to work directly within a Google doc for your work to be automatically saved to the server, or you have to manually upload the files to your Google Drive to back them up each time.

Physical storage. Every few weeks or months, I also take the time to back up my important files to an external hard drive or thumb drive. Again, it's kind of a hassle, but if the day ever comes that you lose your passwords or find that they've been changed, a company's servers go down or they go bankrupt, they decide to start charging you to access your data, or whatever crazy circumstance you can think of, it's always good to have a physical backup somewhere. A basic 1 TB thumb drive is somewhere around 20$ USD (though it can be slower at that price point if you're transferring a large amount of data each time), and it's even less if you don't need that much storage. A 1 TB external hard drive (which has a much quicker transfer rate) is around 40-50$.

If all else fails, email. If you can't get access to physical storage devices and cloud storage services don't work for you, consider setting up a free Gmail or what-have-you account specifically for backup purposes, then email a copy of your most important files to it every time you make a significant change to them. This may seem sort of primitive and simplistic, but it works, and you can even use it as a little journal or diary of your progress!

Again, you may think this is overkill, but I am convinced that writers are especially prone to proving Murphy's Law and have seen way too many projects, friends, and colleagues fall prey to this oft-overlooked issue. I can count at least half a dozen times where -> my primary device like my laptop broke, failed, became corrupted, had water spilled on it, etc. -> I then turned to my secondary device (hard drive or thumb drive) only to find something was wrong with THAT (broken, outdated, incompatible with currently-owned tech, corrupted, not up-to-date backups) OR I turned to my cloud storage and found something wrong with THAT (unknowingly saved over data and didn't realize it until 3 months later, meaning not even version history could save me) -> and it was only the THIRD method of backing up that saved my ass.

Anyway, this is just your friendly neighborhood writer reminding you to back your work up! It's a necessary part of the job! Thanks for coming to my TEDtalk!

[virtualizationhowto]

NAKIVO Backup and Replication v10.9 GA: New Bare-Metal Recovery and Malware Scan Features

NAKIVO Backup and Replication v10.9 GA: New Bare-Metal Recovery and Malware Scan Features @vexpert #vmwarecommunities #100daysofhomelab #homelab #NakivoBackup&Replicationv10.9Features #BareMetalRecoveryBenefits #BackupMalwareScan

Protecting your data in a world with ever-increasing cybersecurity threats and hybrid infrastructure is crucial. I wrote a blog post not long ago covering the features included in NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.9 Beta. True to their aggressive release cycle, NAKIVO has released the GA version of v10.9. This version introduces new features to enhance malware protection, streamline physical server…

[la-sera]

My computer needs to be repaired or some part replaced. Luckily I managed to backup all important data before it couldn't turn on again. This is the last image I'm working on, still WIP. I hope I can quickly buy the necessary hardware quickly so I can continue making this image.

My computer's name is Dauntless,

so,

RIP, Dauntless.

[screentones-webcomicresources]

There are many web hosting companies to choose from if you're taking the plunge into making your own website with a comic content management system (CMS) like ComicControl or Grawlix, a Wordpress comic theme like Toocheke or ComicPress, or a HTML template to cut/paste code like Rarebit. While these solutions are generally free, finding a home for them is... generally not. It can be hard to choose what's best for your webcomic AND your budget!

We took a look at a few of the top hosting services used by webcomics creators using webcomic CMSes, and we put out a poll to ask your feedback about your hosts!

This post may be updated as time goes on as new services enter the hosting arena, or other important updates come to light.

Questions:

💻 I can get a free account with Wix/Squarespace/Carrd, could I just use those for my comic? - Web hosts like this may have gallery functions that could be adapted to display a series of pages, but they are very basic and not intended for webcomics.

📚 Wait, I host on Webtoon, Tapas, Comic Fury, or some other comic website, why are they not here? - Those are comic platforms! We'll get into those in a future post!

🕵️‍♀️Why does it say "shared hosting"? Who am I sharing with? - "Shared hosting" refers to sharing the server space with other customers. They will not have access to your files or anything, so it is perfectly fine to use for most comic CMSes. You may experience slowing if there is too much activity on a server, so if you're planning to host large files or more than 10 comics, you may want to upgrade to a more robust plan in the future.

Web Host List

Neocities

Basic plan pricing: Free or $5/month. Free plan has more restrictions (1 GB space, no custom domain, and slower bandwidth, among other things)

Notes: Neocities does not have database support for paid or free accounts, and most comic CMS solutions require this (ComicCtrl, Grawlix, Wordpress). You will need to work with HTML/CSS files directly to make a website and post each page.

Hostinger

Basic plan pricing: $11.99/month or $7.99/month with four year commitment (monthly, 1, 2, and 4 year plans available).

Notes: Free domain for the 1st year. Free SSL Certifications. Weekly backups.

KnownHost

Basic plan pricing: $8.95/month or $7.99/month with four year commitment (monthly, 1, 2, and 4 year plans available).

Notes: Free DDOS protection. Free SSL Certifications.

InMotion Hosting

Basic plan pricing: $12.99/month or $9.99/month with three year commitment (monthly, 1, and 3 year plans available).

Notes:  Free SSL Certifications, free domain names for 1 and 3 year plans. 24/7 live customer service and 90-day money-back guarantee. Inmotion also advertises eco-friendly policies: We are the first-ever Green Data Center in Los Angeles. We cut cooling costs by nearly 70 percent and reduce our carbon output by more than 2,000 tons per year.

Reviews:

👍“I can't remember it ever going down.”

👍“InMotion has a pretty extensive library full of various guides on setting up and managing websites, servers, domains, etc. Customer service is also fairly quick on responding to inquiries.” 👎“I wish it was a bit faster with loading pages.”

Ionos Hosting

Basic plan pricing: $8/month or $6/month with three year commitment (monthly, 1, 2 and 3 year plans available).

Notes: Free domain for the first year, free SSL Certification, Daily backup and recovery is included. Site Scan and Repair is free for the first 30 days and then is $6/month.

Reviews:

👍“Very fast and simple” 👎“Customer service is mediocre and I can't upload large files”

Bluehost

Basic plan pricing: $15.99/month or $4.95/month with three year commitment (monthly, 1, 3 year plans available).

Notes: Free domain and SSL certificates (for first year only). 24/7 Customer Service. Built to handle higher traffic websites. Although they specialize in Wordpress websites and provide updates automatically, that's almost a bad thing for webcomic plugins because they will often break your site. Their cloud hosting services are currently in early access with not much additional information available.

Reviews:

👎"The fees keep going up. Like I could drop $100 to cover a whole year, but now I'm paying nearly $100 for just three months. It's really upsetting."

👎"I have previously used Bluehost’s Wordpress hosting service and have had negative experiences with the service, so please consider with a grain of salt. I can confirm at least that their 24/7 customer service was great, although needed FAR too often."

Dreamhost

Basic plan pricing: $7.99/month or $5.99/month with three year commitment (monthly, 1, 3 year plans available).

Notes: Free SSL Certificates, 24/7 support with all plans, 97-day moneyback guarantee. Not recommended for ComicCtrl CMS

Reviews:

👍“They've automatically patched 2 security holes I created/allowed by mistake.” 👍“Prices are very reasonable” 👎 “back end kind of annoying to use” 👎 “wordpress has some issues” 👎 “it's not as customizable as some might want“

GoDaddy

Basic plan pricing: $11.99/month or $9.99/month with three year commitment (monthly, 1, 2, and 3 year plans available).

Notes: Free 24/7 Customer service with all plans, Free SSL Certificates for 1 year, free domain and site migration.

Reviews:

👍Reasonable intro prices for their Economy hosting, which has 25GB of storage 👍Migrated email hosting service from cPanel to Microsoft Office, which has greater support but may not be useful for most webcomic creators. 👎 Many site issues and then being upsold during customer service attempts. 👎 Server quality found lacking in reviews 👎 Marketing scandals in the past with a reputation for making ads in poor taste. Have been attempting to clean up that image in recent years. 👎 “GoDaddy is the McDonald's of web hosting. Maybe the Wal-Mart of hosting would be better. If your website was an object you would need a shelf to put it on. You go to Wal-Mart and buy a shelf. It's not great. It's not fancy. It can only hold that one thing. And if we're being honest - if the shelf broke and your website died it wouldn't be the end of the world.The issue comes when you don't realize GoDaddy is the Wal-Mart of hosting. You go and try to do things you could do with a quality shelf. Like, move it. Or add more things to it.” MyWorkAccountThisIs on Reddit*

Things to consider for any host:

💸 Introductory/promotional pricing - Many hosting companies offer free or inexpensive deals to get you in the door, and then raise the cost for these features after the first year or when you renew. The prices in this post are the base prices that you can expect to pay after the promotional prices end, but may get outdated, so you are encouraged to do your own research as well.

💻 Wordpress hosting - Many of the companies below will have a separate offering for Wordpress-optimized hosting that will keep you updated with the latest Wordpress releases. This is usually not necessary for webcomic creators, and can be the source of many site-breaking headaches when comic plugins have not caught up to the latest Wordpress releases.

Any basic hosting plan on this list will be fine with Wordpress, but expect to stop or revert Wordpress versions if you go with this as your CMS.

🤝 You don't have to go it alone - While free hosts may be more limited, paid hosting on a web server will generally allow you to create different subdomains, or attach additional purchased domains to any folders you make. If you have other comic-making friends you know and trust, you can share your server space and split the cost!

Want to share your experience?

Feel free to contribute your hosting pros, cons, and quirks on our survey! We will be updating our list periodically with your feedback!

[genreawareness]

a lot of entirely correct stuff has been said about the issues with discord as a platform but its search function is kind of irreplaceable. the fact that i have an easily searchable two and a half year index of a large portion of my life and some of the most important people in it without having to worry about eating up my phone storage is craaaazy. the internet is cool

as much as like. yeah being terminally online is bad for you or whatever and the tumblr search function isn’t half as good as it should be, the fact that i can access any kind of ephemera + see how i talked to my friends before we were friends and the idle thoughts i had from years ago + the way i spoke is a joy

[feyclowns]

a look at magic and the core system

the core system explanation and my loose idea of what magic is. this uh. this got long. this is a longass post.

my thoughts on magic

i have this idea that mother nature, while creating her earlier lifeforms, used magic as a sort of bind-all, something modeled after the overarching powers of time and creation, etc- giving them extra powers and extending their life (like a kid making their first ocs). most of her older creatures are on planes higher up and function on magic. as she got better with her craft she began to appreciate the complexity of making all those bits and pieces stuff on earth has, and the faster ebb and flow of life AND death. humans are one of her favorite creations.

magic is inherently chaotic. it exists in multiple forms, on multiple planes. it's something that touches things in a biological way and yet obeys physical laws set before it. it can be stored and used up. it can create more of itself. it can corrupt things. when mother nature realized it was a bad idea to give near-unlimited power to beings when she was creating ones of lower ability on the planes below, she changed magic and the creatures that used it- gave them weaknesses, sometimes bordering on the ridiculous, compulsions too. things to keep them in check.

i also like to think you can't entirely 1:1 seelie to humans on even a biological cell-scale. they just fundamentally are different.

magic's function

the more pure magic is, the more powerful it is- magic comes in all colors of the rainbow, but different colors have slightly different attributes. one can never truly filter one color out of magic entirely, as it needs all its components to function.

with the True Fey nearly extinct, the only beings that can use raw magic without the assistance of a device or sigil are genies, and i'd argue they got quite the short end of the stick considering their compulsion.

fairies, fey and their subspecies primarily function on purple magic. this stuff is filtered, diluted, as "neutral" as one can get. if you create magic rather than consume it, and your species functions on filtered magic, you cannot handle it raw. like, your body can't handle the extra energy. physically.

magical backup is when a fairy has so much magic in their system they cannot filter the chaotic energy that magic produces and explode.

filtered magic is also, simply, on paper, easiest to use. as a third party, non-seelie magic user- use raw magic while unprepared and get evaporated while changing the laws of physics. use overfiltered magic without the correct sigils and nothing happens except maybe a bitter taste in your mouth.

onto the core system.

the core system

the neural core is where magic flows freely up towards- the filter strains clean, purple magic from the magic produced by the central core. conscious wishes are also made from the brain connected to the core here.

the central core is where magic is generated. the central core takes calories and nutrients from ingested food (fairies have a stomach that is right next to their core) and converts it into magic. the core membrane acts as a storage for filtered magic in both areas.

the core pools are located at the base of the wrists of a fairy, which are where excess magic flows and stays in anticipation of use. when a fairy exhausts the magic from their pools, they must wait until they begin to refill from the reserves in the core membranes.

the inner cores are the most important part of the system; if this part of a fairy is damaged they will die. this part also holds the data for the rest of the body- if worse comes to worse, the inner cores will maintain the body parts left and rebuild the core system before completing the rest of the body. this is in part why fairies are so gd resilient. no inner core, no regeneration.

magic threads are what magic travels along throughout the body. they are thick, wide tubes that extend through the torso and extremities. the central thread is also called a nervous thread. during pregnancy, the body creates a sixth thread (and sometimes seventh) to deliver magic to the developing child's core.

fairies produce raw magic in their central cores. they have two cores- a central and neural core, which are connected to each other through the nervous thread and extend to their magic pools and flow magic through the body by the four magic threads.

anti-fairies are where all that excess magic goes when fairies filter it out. anti fairies don't need to generate magic or filter it- they can handle it just fine. they have a simpler core layout- a thick core membrane to hold their magic and the excess chaotic magic swirling about in their inner core. this enables anti-fairies to grant powerful rule-free wishes. anti-fairies tend to have strange colored magic threads, generally aligning with the color of their counterparts' eyes.

pixies are quirky things. pixies have the same amount of cores as their fairy cousins but do not produce raw magic. they instead need to feed on magical creatures (or take their magic supplements, as provided by pixies INC) to keep their core systems afloat. another issue is that most pixies' core filters still work- which would be fine if they produced magic. pixies overfilter their magic, leading them to use a highly complicated wand (along with several binding contracts) to utilize the magic still delivered to their core pools. (it's also a phone. why not toss that in for free? Head Pixie was feeling really nice when he made that decision.)

pixies have a very large core filter and membrane in their neural core, with a small central core and large magic pools. their magic threads are thin.

[mariacallous]

One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry's vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: Roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable.

Music industry publication Mix spoke with the people in charge of backing up the entertainment industry. The resulting tale is part explainer on how music is so complicated to archive now, part warning about everyone's data stored on spinning disks.

"In our line of work, if we discover an inherent problem with a format, it makes sense to let everybody know," Robert Koszela, global director for studio growth and strategic initiatives at Iron Mountain, told Mix. "It may sound like a sales pitch, but it's not; it's a call for action."

Hard drives gained popularity over spooled magnetic tape as digital audio workstations, mixing and editing software, and the perceived downsides of tape, including deterioration from substrate separation and fire. But hard drives present their own archival problems. Standard hard drives were also not designed for long-term archival use. You can almost never decouple the magnetic disks from the reading hardware inside, so if either fails, the whole drive dies.

There are also general computer storage issues, including the separation of samples and finished tracks, or proprietary file formats requiring archival versions of software. Still, Iron Mountain tells Mix that “if the disk platters spin and aren’t damaged," it can access the content.

But "if it spins" is becoming a big question mark. Musicians and studios now digging into their archives to remaster tracks often find that drives, even when stored at industry-standard temperature and humidity, have failed in some way, with no partial recovery option available.

“It’s so sad to see a project come into the studio, a hard drive in a brand-new case with the wrapper and the tags from wherever they bought it still in there,” Koszela says. “Next to it is a case with the safety drive in it. Everything’s in order. And both of them are bricks.”

Entropy Wins

Mix's passing along of Iron Mountain's warning hit Hacker News earlier this week, which spurred other tales of faith in the wrong formats. The gist of it: You cannot trust any medium, so you copy important things over and over, into fresh storage. "Optical media rots, magnetic media rots and loses magnetic charge, bearings seize, flash storage loses charge, etc.," writes user abracadaniel. "Entropy wins, sometimes much faster than you’d expect."

There is discussion of how SSDs are not archival at all; how floppy disk quality varied greatly between the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s; how Linear Tape-Open, a format specifically designed for long-term tape storage, loses compatibility over successive generations; how the binder sleeves we put our CD-Rs and DVD-Rs in have allowed them to bend too much and stop being readable.

Knowing that hard drives will eventually fail is nothing new. Ars wrote about the five stages of hard drive death, including denial, back in 2005. Last year, backup company Backblaze shared failure data on specific drives, showing that drives that fail tend to fail within three years, that no drive was totally exempt, and that time does, generally, wear down all drives. Google's server drive data showed in 2007 that HDD failure was mostly unpredictable, and that temperatures were not really the deciding factor.

So Iron Mountain's admonition to music companies is yet another warning about something we've already heard. But it's always good to get some new data about just how fragile a good archive really is.