Anyway, on the subject of this thread, it's probably a good occasion to talk about backups.
While most users learn to make backups after a loss, I can always hope some don't. Again, if you manage someone else's data or funds, you should be extra careful and do the last step regularly.
I know what you mean. I had regular weekly backups. Check.
A good backup is offsite. That means storing it elsewhere than where the data is. If you're with provider A, the backup shouldn't be managed by provider A. And obviously, in another physical location.
Check, we had offsite backups. But there's no reason not to trust the same provider; I'd be interested to know a scenario other than outright fraud where keeping a backup with another provider would add security. In many ways, keeping an offsite backup with the same provider increases security vs. using a second provider.
A good backup is offline. If somehow your automated backup fails and deletes the old stuff, you're screwed. Offline backups have the advantage of being in a certain, know state. Of course, they aren't always practical, but you should have at least one offline backup at all times.
Point taken, but the likelyhood of a fire in a home destroying a piece of paper is greater than the likelyhood of a fire in a well-managed data center with an auto shutdown procedure. From the standpoint of security, encrypted communicatoins from one place to another with rsync is much more secure than keeping a paper backup.
A good backup has history - don't keep only the latest copy. Maybe something is broken in the new ones. The ability to go back is very comfortable.
Check. Our backups were incremental (and our new backups are incremental as well). I like incremental backups -- damn you, Time Machine!
Since we're in Bitcoin, and you're likely to store sensitive information, you should definitively encrypt your backups.
Of course, you also have to not lose your way of decrypting it. There are various choices which I'm not going to expose here.
Aye. If someone got ahold of my paper copy privkeys they would not be able to use that information to directly input and get the bitcoins. They're not quite encrypted but without knowing the key it would be useless information.
RAID is not a backup. It helps reduce service interruptions, but will never protect against many type of data loss.
A good backup is tested. Which means restoring your data on a new system with only the backup available. I have seen backups systems that were not tested, and were broken, incomplete, etc. This is probably the least done thing in backups.
A remote raid array keeping an incremental copy is a backup copy of your data.
No matter how you store your data it is at risk. You can go to tape and you will be at risk of magnetic interference. You can go to punchcards and be at risk of fire, or even careless folding, spindling and mutilating. Right now we have a local raid array as a remote backup, but I can tell you first hand that is not 100% secure -- just two weeks ago a disk failed on another RAID in the office and before I could replace it the volume crashed.
The main point of a backup is that when your main copy fails you can go to the backup to restore your data. If you want extra security the best you can do is have two or more backups in different locations. I assure you that this is a risk vs. reward scenario; I just spent $1200 on a new DS-4 and drives; if I spend another $2000-$3000 on a better backup solution and maybe again in another location, I quickly approach the value of what was just lost. From a risk vs reward scenario doing that does not make sense based on how much money I kept in the wallet. That is what I find so humorous about people like floppypony and the team -- they just don't get it. I did the all the right things -- including not overspending on financially unjustifiable redundancy.
And there's a good chance the backups will be found and restored any day now. After all, I did have offsite backups.
