I had grand plans for today. It's the 3rd, everyone at my day job has basically checked out already because Friday's a holiday, and I told myself I'd use the quiet afternoon to write something sharp about whatever the big tech story of the week was. Instead I spent four hours going through backups I hadn't looked at since roughly the Obama administration and I regret nothing.
It started because I wanted to grab a screenshot from a post I wrote here in like 2013 and the image was just... gone. 404. The kind of dead link that makes you go cold for a second because you assume you've lost something bigger. Turns out it was just one bad path from a migration years ago, but it sent me down a hole of checking every backup I supposedly have, and what I found was not encouraging.
I've got:
- an external drive from 2019 that whines when it spins up (bad sign)
- a folder called
blog_FINAL_reallyfinalon a laptop I don't use anymore - a half-finished restic setup I configured once, tested once, and then never checked on again
That last one is the embarrassing part. I remember setting it up specifically so I wouldn't have this problem, and then I just trusted it blindly for something like two years. Didn't verify a single restore. If that drive had actually died I would've found out the hard way, probably at 1am, probably right when I needed something.
So today's project became: actually fix this, instead of writing about it hypothetically like I usually do.
What I ended up doing
I pulled everything down to one machine first: the full WordPress export, the image library, an old side project called Notesink that I built one bored October and never finished (a dead simple note-taking thing, single user, no plans to ever launch it, just mine). Then I did the boring but correct thing: three copies, two different media, one offsite. Local disk, a second local disk that isn't the same brand or the same batch (apparently drives from the same manufacturing run tend to fail around the same time, which I did not know until I went looking and now cannot un-know), and then something offsite that isn't just "another folder on the same home network."
For the offsite piece I ended up spinning up a small VPS through Tricknowtech mostly because I already had a domain parked there and figured I might as well use the same place for hosting, so now the nightly backup job just rsyncs over to that box instead of living only on hardware sitting eighteen inches from the router. Took maybe twenty minutes to get a box up and running, which is faster than I expected honestly, I was bracing for an afternoon of it.
While I was at it I finally redeployed Notesink too. It had been sitting dead on my laptop for probably eight months, not because it was broken, just because deploying it meant SSHing in and remembering fifteen steps I'd forgotten. This time I just pushed to git and it built and went live on its own, which felt almost suspicious the first time it worked. I kept refreshing the page waiting for it to be broken somehow. It wasn't.
None of this is glamorous. Nobody's writing a conference talk about "I finally tested my backups." But I'd bet actual money that most people reading this, if I asked you right now "when did you last successfully restore a file from your backup, not just confirm the backup ran" — a lot of you would go quiet. I would've gone quiet yesterday.
The other thing this whole exercise reminded me: old side projects don't need to be resurrected into something big to be worth keeping alive. Notesink has maybe used a hundred notes total, ever, all mine. It doesn't need users, it doesn't need a roadmap. It just needed to not be dead, and honestly that's a lower bar than I usually set for myself with these things.
Anyway. If you've got a long weekend coming up too and you're the type who's been meaning to check whether your backups actually work — this is your nudge. Do it before the drive tells you the hard way, not after.
I did also mean to write about the bigger tech news this week and I might still get to it this weekend if the grill isn't monopolizing my attention. But some Thursdays you just clean out the attic instead.