‘It had just vanished’ - the shock when tech fails by Chris Baraniuk:

Her site had been in the hands of cloud hosting provider Gridhost, which shut down in November. Mrs Brown never received notifications about the switch-off because her blog had been set up by a third-party business, which had stopped trading.

And she had no access to the backup for her blog either, since it had also been hosted in the cloud by Gridhost. Days of stress ensued. Many tears flowed.

Yet another reminder that a “backup” that lives in the same place as its source is not a backup!

This week we talk about this exciting “new” medium for archiving data that is especially attractive to SMBs and home users. It’s an optical disc that looks like a DVD and is readable in all Blu-Ray drives, but underneath it’s something very different. If you haven’t heard of it, then you’re in luck! Thanks to Daniel Rosehill, backup anorak and friend of the show, we’re going to talk about it – and its competitors on this week’s episode! We discuss the good and bad about using all of the following for archiving: paper, SSD, disk, tape, DVD, Blu-Ray, ending with M-Disc. Learn what’s wrong with these other mediums, and what’s so great about this one in another fun episode of Restore it All!

https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/ab0332f9-1e1a-4aba-902d-55d4aaafead4/M-disc-20Main.mp3

Is it possible to get Nextcloud to eat its own backups, and have it all actually be restore-able?

Synchronise an external storage directory from Nextcloud to your laptop, and download the Nextcloud database dump into that directory. Then, the only thing that needs to be backed up is the external storage. Oh, well, except for everything else…

Anyway, I think there’s some kernel of an interesting backup flow here, in that my new Raspberry Pi NAS will have a place as a nightly restore-checking machine. Just have to figure out the details!