One year ago, I quit my job in order to "make life easier". And by that I mean work+home in the same city. I went from 40 minutes commute - to 3 minutes. I had a blast the first week.

Then I realized that it was actually a mistake. I did not like working with "that kind of systems" and "that kind of tasks". It was tedious, stupid, and I was angry every, single day because the previous ones had built a system on 10-15 year old hardware because "it is cheaper".

That continued for a year. I discovered new stupid "solutions" every week that was potentially dangerous for the company. It built up a huge pile of shit and I started to feel that my mental health was disappearing, fast.

And equipment such as servers, switches, routers, storage started to fail because of age. Despite my warnings from day 0 to the CEO who only kinda laughed it off and said "you can to solve that", but I never got the approval to actually buy the equipment that was needed. Because "the company did'nt have the money for it". Somehow, the company had the money to buy expensive cars for the CEO - I can't really figure out that equation.

So today, one VERY old UPS died at our office. It caused some powerspike that killed off some switches and a NAS.
"Whatever" I thought, I just have to find the backup of the files and get a new one.

Then I discovered, that the NAS that acted as a iSCSI target for VM's and document storage was backed up using VEEAM on another server - that was configured to backup everything to the same NAS. I just wanted to cry, because I could not take anymore shit.

So I picked up my phone, called my old employer and asked if I could start working for them again. My old boss got insanely happy and gave me a great offer which I immediately accepted.

So tomorrow, is the day that I am going to walk into my current boss and say that I will quit. My last day will be on Christmas day. And I will start my new year with a few weeks off, and then back to the job that I actually loved.

Life is to short to work with something you hate.

Never in my life I was scared as today.
I recently left a big company to work for a small one as the first internal developer.
Had a small issue in the production server. The fix was easy, just remove a single table entry. And... *drum roll*... I forgot to add a where clause. All orders were lost.
No idea if we had backups or anything, I quickly called the one other IT dude in the company.
He had no clue where are the backups and how to find them.
Having some experience with Nmap, I quickly scanned our network and found a Nas device.
There was a backup, whole VHD backup. 300GB of it, the download speed is around 512kb/s. No way I can fix it before management finds out, but then an idea came to mind. Old glorious 7zip. Managed to extract only the database files, sent them to the server and quickly swapped them. Everything was fine... The manager connected 5 minutes later. Scariest 45 minutes of my life...

I got the task to set up an NAS, because "server has too high maintenance costs".
I built two databases for this company and the big boss loved my work. (spoiler:not because my work was outstanding but because I, as a student, am cheap and willing to learn).
And now? Reality hit me for good. I looked for a enterprise worthy NAS solution, sent them the details, they bought it and now it's 00:00 in Germany and I'm sitting in the empty hall, trying to configure the storage to work like they want it. On a friday. Alone. As the only member of the IT-team. With way to much responsibility.

So... Yea, fuck you for good. I hope your backup gets an disk error at the same moment i quit. (but first gimme mah monney)

I was cleaning up my hard drive and deleted some old directories.
I was notified that my backup just started and wanted to look how far along it was.
However, instead of 'ls -l /mnt/DATA/Backup' my shitpile of muscle memory typed 'rm -rf /mnt/DATA/Backup'... That's when my harddrive suddenly had 750GB of free space and I decided that I probably need some sleep.

Before any of y'all wanna lecture me on off-site backups, funny thing: Today I implemented a new daily backup routine (praised be borg) and therefore deleted my somewhat chaotic Backups on my NAS "Because if shit hits the fan, I still have my local Backup"

Late night ramble warning.

I like to fix issues. I like to roll up my sleeves and fetch my keyboard or soldering iron on a mission to build a custom solution for whatever real world annoyance that has just triggered my problem solving caveman brain.

I have prided myself in that. I am the kind of guy who doesn't shy away from getting my hands dirty, I tell myself, and it's good because it makes my life easier, I tell myself. But increasingly, I've been wondering if this is really so. Am I really making my life easier? Am I fixing the world or just scratching an itch?

Example 1:
Instead of using conventional backup methods for my personal files like a commercial cloud based service or buying a Synology NAS or something similar, I decided it would be better to build my own linux server and set up a rather obscure configuration in order to address things like parity, ECC, bit-rot and the likes while staying cheap.

Learning a lot? Sure. Fun? Sure. Never have to worry about backups again? The opposite, of course.

While I set out to build the perfect bespoke solution to all my personal backup needs - it's as if I, by putting my time and effort into the nitty gritty of technical implementation, placed a vote for my future to contain more of that stuff. In reality this project has burdened my little brain with many new things to consider in regards to storing my files.

Example 2:
Qwerty and the conventional staggered keyboard layout are relics of past technical limitations and both of them inefficient and bad from an ergonomic perspective.

Possible solution: ignore and carry on or possibly transition to Colemak on a somewhat more ergonomic full size keyboard.
My solution: well, let's also hand build a tiny-ass super obscure ergo keyboard and spend two days to come up with my own layout for all special characters, numbers and function keys.

Fun? Somewhat. Learning a lot? I guess. Never have to think about keyboard layouts again? Lol.

I'm living in a world of pain with various key commands in various apps and edge cases. Could I fix it? Probably make it better but not without quite a bit of effort.

Anyways, it'd be interesting to hear if anyone can relate to this feeling of wanting to fix something once and for all only to find yourself deeper in it then ever before. Idk might be a just me thing. Anyways, goodnight lovely people.

So I spent over 200 hours recovering a raid array because the the business that hired the company I work for tried to do all the work in house. Now I'm to the point of trying to quote a new server setup to the company because the last one got hit by lightning. My quote $8000-$20000 in just hardware alone. If im going to do this I want to do it right. Twin servers running xenserver holding virtual machines with a high-quality Nas to hold the virtual machine. Then have the vm's being imaged to two off site backup devices in two different locations and a cloud backup. My boss comes in after me talks to the guy in charge and tells him all that is needed is one server holding all storage on it just like the last server that died and one off-site backup for $4500. How stupid can someone be who has been doing this for over 20 years? Oh btw the software running on this server will be 911 dispatch, jail records and the database for fine payments. The sheriff making the final call me and my boss are meeting with him tomorrow if my boss tries to undercut me I'm going to tell them both that if the same shit happens next time they can spend the time themselves trying to recover stuff because I done the over 200 hours in just short of two weeks.

Seagate: A reliable source of unreliable NAS Drives. Rest assured, that they're gonna fail way before everything else, so that you're warned, when your other drives may not last much longer too ◔ᴗ◔

I stopped laughing, when my NAS' external Backup Drive, a Seagate, started throwing I/O Errors ๏̯͡๏

About a month ago I sorted out some old electronic stuff and found my old laptop from 2011. A 2:nd Gen i7 8gb ram. I replaced it due to several bluescreens a day that later turned out to be caused by a faulty RAM module (was 16Gb back then).
Well, back then it became a backup laptop and went on the shelf and almost forgotten.

I went through all the old files on it and copied them to the NAS, replaced the mechanic drive with cheep SSD.
Used the old Win7 license key to upgrade to win 10 , dust off the fan, and it turned out to be usable.

I have much better computers so I would not use it for anything but today I gave it to my 6 year old nephew so he can start using a computer and build his knowledge. Worse case; If he spills soda on it he'll learn not to do that with the more expensive computers he will use in future.
So win win. I got to get rid of some junk that had been gathering dust for many years by giving my nephew an opportunity to get started with computers.

Finally, the timing: Microsoft announced a few days back that any new upgrade from windows 7&8 to 10 is no longer supported, but that computer still has a valid win 10 license as it was updated a month ago.

"RAID isn't backup"
"RAID is super not backup"
"Don't do RAID, do backups"

B-But I want to do backups... to a backup nas using RAID. No good?

Yesterday I took the evening to set up a backup server on my home NAS, so I could finally backup my dualboot laptop. Today I came home from work, boot up the laptop to configure the clients.... This happen, fucking black screen and doesn't even boot! Fuck fuck fuuuuuuck!!!

I'm thinking about buying a small nas device to store backup and media files. WD my cloud and synology ds120 caught my attention regarding price and functionality. Does anyone have experience with them? Any recommendations?

Reupload the most recent backup on the NAS, i think i've found it.

Just lost every file i own... Fuck windows. I upgraded my nas, plugged backup hdd into windows machine, bsod, filesystem corrupt. Thanks Microsoft. These were important files. Unreplaceable.

Had a Nas with a single 3tb seagate HDD in it.
It ran well for half a year and it was my main backup and a time machine for my dad.

The time came that my budget was allowing a second drive for redundancy so I powered it off, added the second drive and powered it back on.

😐😓😧😭

The drive did indeed die and yes, it was one of those drives with an extremely high failure rate.

My dad was pretty mad that his backups were gone even though he didn't need them.

So my biggest lesson from this was to always encrypt such drives because dads backup wasn't and my files and such weren't either, so someone could restore our hole life's from the drive.
So I can't Rma that fucker.
Zfs at rest encryption ftw!

By the way, writing this I noticed that I didn't need to power the Nas down to add the second drive....
Ffffffffuuuuuuuuucccckkkkkk.

Another more recent thing was a refurb 4tb we red that I bought used for a bargain.
It reported 2 unwritable sectors but I didn't care for the money.

After about a month, it died.
The interesting part is how it died.
It spinns up, gets detected, you can access the data.
You can copy the data.

But after a few moments of continues load, all operations start timing out and the drive either disconnects completely or the zpool degrades and shuts down.

In the first case, replugging brings the drive back untill it does it again.

On zpool degradation only a reboot brings it back.

Put a fan on it in case it was overheating but that didn't fix it.

External Storage recommendation questions.

Im in need of some sort of external storage, either a harddrive or a NAS server, but idk what to get.

Price should be reasonable for the security and storage space it gives, so heres what i figured so far for pros and cons:

NAS Server:
+ Bigger capacity
+ Raid option
+ Easily expandable
+ Always accessible via the network (local)

- Difficult to transport (not gonna do that, but still)
- Expensive
- Physically larger
- Consumes power 24/7 (i dont pay for power currently)

Harddrive:
+ Easy to pack away and transport
+ Cheaper

- If drive fails, youre fucked
- If you want larger capacity, you end up with two external backups

What do you guys do? Im not sure what i should do :i
Any advice is appreciated.

It will be used for external backup, as mentioned. For my server and my own pc.

Any recommendations for cloud backup? I want somewhere I can backup my Linux NAS. Backblaze (personal, not B2) would be amazing if it had any support for Linux.

Cannot live in this mess of a backup anymore! I do a lot of video and photo work and I back up to multiple external HDD'S . I try make sure all the files are reflected on another drive. I to get a NAS and raid 1. Has any one got recommendations? I'm looking 3tb x 2, budget friendly. What's your backup situation like?