Project Management

Backups

If you have read my misadventures of week 1, you know where this is going.

Laptop Backups

Week 17 was a bit messy, and my laptop died for the second time in 4 months.

Please allow me to do a full breakdown of the situation:

• my laptop died
• For the second time in 4 months
• For the second time since I started FabAcademy 5 months ago!
• Wait… the laptop was only 6 months old, since I had originally bought it specifically for this very course.
• Yeah…
• Lesson learned: do not buy ASUS - Republic of Gamers laptops
• Lesson learned: I have been very thankful that I purchased Backup software last December. I did not anticipate it was going to be so useful and such a life-saver.
  • I was able to take backups almost daily, it would complete the backup in about 30 minutes, and whenever I had to restore all the work it was able to perform the recovery in under 45 mins. In moments of absolute panic, Acronis has been able to fly in and save the day consistent and cleanly.
  • The fact that it supported hard drives with Linux + Windows partitions was a huge factor when I was choosing a backup product that I could rely on, and I’m happy to say that it has lived to the task.

RaspberryPi Backups

Using a Raspberry Pi introduced a new risk. A completely configured and running system that was not being backed up in any way. Since having any type of infrastructure-as-code for this project seemed a bit overkill, especially for iteration 1, where things would change a lot as I do exploration and discovery, I would have to rely on other tools to make sure my config would be easy to restore, should anything happen to my devices.

The SD card is arguably, the weakest link in this setup.

I decide to try win32diskimager as a backup too for SD Cards.

I had some issues with Acronis, and I could not dedicate more time trying to debug and troubleshoot backup strategies.

Pros and Cons for using an SD Card Backup via Imaging software instead of an actual backup solution:

Pros:

• It just works!

Cons:

• Each backup will clone the entire SD Card.. .so each image will occupy 32GB, even if the SD Card is not full.

The Pros definitely outweigh the Cons: 32 GB per day is a small price to pay, and I can afford it, considering there are very few days left until the end of the project.

Acronis proved to be very inefficient when it came to its backup approach for SD cards:

800 KBps for a 32 GB card means ~= 42.300 seconds ~= 11h every time I have to do a backup.

Win32 Disk Imager

The main worry was that it would only be able to backup partitions formatted for, and visible to, Windows.

$30 min * 17 MBps ~= 32 GB$

A quick calculation seems to indicate that it is backing up the entire device, and not just the tiny boot partition. Great news!

Task manager seems to confirm:

Verifying Backup

After some checks, it seems that the backup has been done correctly and that I can rely on it going forward.

Backup contents look good:

Backup image integrity also looks good: