Backups and Recovery

This is a letter about lessons learned the hard way. Perhaps one of the most important things to remember in computer administration is to never assume, as I have been. This concerns backups and recovering data.

Whatever backup strategy you have - ALWAYS check that in such an event where you to accidentally deleted a file or renamed it, or it became in some way corrupted, that you can recover that file. In other words, do test recoveries!

As an avid user of Google Drive I know that whenever I work I on a file, I can see the revision history for that file and can recover it to any prior change in the past. What I had assumed was that this applied to all files and not just Google's own docs, sheets, etc. After contacting Google concerning the need to recover a bunch of non-Google files stored on Google drive, they informed me that they are not a backup solution and that those files cannot be recovered.

Currently I'm looking into backup solutions that have revisioning (the ability to recover a file to any prior change). One of the cheapest and well-known solutions seems to be Carbonite, but I would be interested in what other people use and suggest.

Final note. The proper backup solution is the 3-2-1 rule.

You should have 3 backups,

You should have backups on at least 2 types of media,

You should have one backup off-site.

In other words, you could have one backup on your computer, a second backup on a USB Drive, and a third backup in the cloud.