RIP my photos from 2017 and contacts from 2005

summerof69@lemm.ee to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 172 points –

I recently decided to replace the SD card in my Raspberry Pi and reinstall the system. Without any special backups in place, I turned to rsync to duplicate /var/lib/docker with all my containers, including Nextcloud.

Step #1: I mounted an external hard drive to /mnt/temp.

Step #2: I used rsync to copy the data to /mnt/tmp. See the difference?

Step #3: I reformatted the SD card.

Step #4: I realized my mistake.

Moral: no one is immune to their own stupidity 😂

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If you have one backup, you have no backup. That's a hard lesson to learn, but if you care about those photos it's possible to recover them if you haven't written stuff on that sdcard yet.

At least 3 backups, 2 different media, 1 offsite location.

I like 3-2-1-1-0 better. Like yours, but:

  • the additional 1 is for "offline" (so you have one offsite and offline backup copy).
  • 0 for zero errors. Backups must be tested and verified.

Also, if you haven't tried to restore from backup, you have no backup.