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Suggestions to avoid accidental deletes?


vfsrecycle_kid

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Hi folks,

 

Got a question I figure maybe some people in here have thought about. So there's the age old debate of duplication vs. replication - and I get it.

 

I've got family photos in a DrivePool with 3x Global Duplication (around 1TB total). Now this is all replicated in the pool.

 

While this protects against hard drive failures, this does not protect against mistakes. My father could delete the Photo directory and it's effectively game over (yes there are undelete tools but lets ignore that for the sake of the argument).

 

What I am wondering is if people have any tried-and-tested minimal effort solutions to this kind of problem vector?

 

My initial ideas:

  • Remove deletion privileges from the main user used to access the NAS
  • Destructive actions can only be performed via a special "Deletion" designed Windows user, with a different login and password

Alternatively:

  • Create a second DrivePool for data I want to designate as "mistake proof"
  • Use some form of incremental/differential/<something else> backup tool to routinely (every week?) mirror from the original DrivePool to the secondary pool.
  • The idea being that, if files are ever deleted on Pool A, their "ghost" will always live on Pool B (aka Pool B should be forever growing, never decreasing)

Or:

  • Some sort hybrid solution between 1 and 2?

 

The second solution assumes the data rarely changes - which in the case of my family photos.

 

Now I'm not saying any of my solutions are right, I am still very much in the brainstorming process. I want my family to have confidence that I can keep their data safe (DrivePool is around 40TB big now, but for this post, only 1TB applies to my 'problem') - and that effectively means that I need to protect them.....from themselves.

 

And who knows, maybe I'll write the wrong command in the CLI one day and accidentally nuke everything...

 

Thanks folks!

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To me, the correct solution is cloud based or other backup. This will generally prevent you from having the problem you are concerned with as far as accidental deletes, as long as you notice the deletion before the backup goes out of rotation.  It also protects you from catostrophic site failure, no one likes to think about it this way, but if your house gets flooded, burned down, broken into, you are still at single point of failure with only a single location. If it's that important, have it available off site.

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I'd suggest Crashplan or similar local/cloud automatic backup software that supports email notifications ("computer xyz has not backed up in 2 weeks") and versioning ("family member deleted / saved over the wrong file" and "only realised a week later they needed the old file" situations).

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To me, the correct solution is cloud based or other backup. This will generally prevent you from having the problem you are concerned with as far as accidental deletes, as long as you notice the deletion before the backup goes out of rotation.  It also protects you from catostrophic site failure, no one likes to think about it this way, but if your house gets flooded, burned down, broken into, you are still at single point of failure with only a single location. If it's that important, have it available off site.

 

 

I'd suggest Crashplan or similar local/cloud automatic backup software that supports email notifications ("computer xyz has not backed up in 2 weeks") and versioning ("family member deleted / saved over the wrong file" and "only realised a week later they needed the old file" situations).

 

I definitely agree with you both - that I should employ some sort of cloud solution - to at least get rid of the 'single point of catastrophic failure' (and quite honestly, had slipped my mind, I'll look into this later in the week, Amazon has a $60/yr "Unlimited" Photos/Videos storage plan - but I'll dig deeper)

 

However, that alone won't really address my issue - as you mentioned by yourself "as long as you noticed before the deletion goes out of rotation".

I can't necessarily trust that we'll happen to find out the file was missing. Things could disappear and we wouldn't even know they are gone. For all I know some cloud providers (I know Dropbox keeps a detailed log of deleted files and sometimes offers the ability to recover deleted files....but.....

I think in my case I really want a robust, highly documented/customizable solution. (Example: On Dropbox you can't say "keep deleted files for X period" - but can you on Amazon? I'm not sure, I'll have to check)

 

Shane makes a fantastic point, that most likely something with explicit versioning might help me out with this. I've looked at Syncthing in the past (mostly because I helped setup my neighbors on a Syncthing cluster) as well as Crashplan. The former doesn't have email notifications however.

 

But it seems Syncthing offers an interesting thing:

Granted I know close to nothing about Crashplan so I will look into it. I'm a little biased to the opensource syncthing as it has treated my neighbors well (they have a 3machine 2laptop cluster that keeps their ~50GB of essential data safe)..

 

What I think I will do is a test run of Simple File Versioning on my neighbors machine to see how this versioning mechanism works.

 

It would be minimal effort for me to code a small script that sends out an email whenever files are moved to Syncthing's "versioning" folder (as mentioned above in the Syncthing docs, a ".stversions" folder is created)

 

This way, I don't have to worry about the problem of 'noticing deleted files before they are rotated' - with Syncthing I can simply set it to 'move deleted files to .stversions, and NEVER remove it from there unless manually removed)

 

And of course there is the added benefit of having a node in the cluster running outside of the house - in the case of fire.

 

---

 

My mind is all over the place, but I am not necessarily in a hurry to implement all things. Thank you for the great ideas so far, especially since they never occurred to me....

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Well, cloud isn't necessary, but please do follow the "3-2-1 backup rule":

  • Have at least three copies of your data.
  • Store the copies on two different media.
  • Keep one backup copy offsite.

This is the best way to protect against data loss/deletion/acts of cats/etc. 

 

Versioning is also nice, but keep in mind that this takes up a lot more disk space, very quickly.  

 

 

 

Even a second "pool" for this stuff (hosted in a multi bay external enclosure would work for this).

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But it would be nice with a Rescue / Recycle folder for accidental deletes, that workes both local and if deleted over network.

One copy of deleted will be saved to this folder. That would be a great feature for Stablebit and more secure :P

 

Ironically, if you move/map your user folders (such as documents, downloads, etc) to a network path, it does/should enable a "recycle bin", specifically for that purpose.  

 

As for a recycle bin sort of function, I've asked/bugged Alex about this, and it's something that would be incredibly complex to do, and potentially cause a huge list of problems.  To the point that it may be simpler to get VSS working...

 

Either way, it's something that I would like to see myself, so I have and will continue to push for this sort of functionality. 

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