• 3 posts
  • 40 comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 17th, 2023

I am quite worried about losing information and not being able to recover it from the backups, so I am trying to nail the best automated way to make sure the backups are good.

Restic comes with a check command, that according to the documentation here has this two “levels”:

  • Structural consistency and integrity, e.g. snapshots, trees and pack files (default)
  • Integrity of the actual data that you backed up

In plain words, I understand this as: The data you uploaded to the repository is still that data.

Now my question is, do you think this is enough to trust the backups are right? I was thinking about restoring the backup in a temporary location and running diff on random files to check the files match the source, but I don’t know if this is redundant now.

How do you make sure you can trust your backups?

  • My advice would be, be pragmatical, an error on a backup script I did not notice wiped the time tracking data I had been collecting on my self hosted database for over a year. I got really anxious at first, because of my mistake and because of the data lost. But at the end of the day… Who cares, life goes on, this is only a hobby.

  • No joke, I once met a guy like this in an indie game developers meetup, and on top of that he was extremely vague about his idea because he told everyone he once managed to get a coder on board and “that rat wanted to take advantage of him and his idea”, literally.

I like the fact that my Android phone records my location timeline from Google Maps, but the fact that this is stored in Google servers creeps me out.

I know you can download the entire location history database from Google so I was planning on building a custom app to store and browse this data.

I was also curious if there would be the possibility of making the phone send locations to this app instead of Google, but I don’t know much about Android and I don’t know if this would be possible.

What do you think about it? Is there already an app like this? Do you think this is a good idea?