Making Backups Quickly and Reliably
Two days ago I unplugged the "spinning rust" (then put it in a safe drawer) after writing about 3TB to it. In the coming days (weekend) I'll write another 4TB to it.
Backups are imperative, more so in an age of uncertainty, unpredictable weather, and worsening standards (quality of products going down while prices go up).
If all goes according to plan, we'll then make an encrypted drive and shelve it offsite in a safe place.
At the moment we have a lot of material that's scheduled to be published in years to come. We also have loads of personal files, which include about 50,000 photos, thousands of media files (lots of music), and various old projects.
I still have many files with me that go back to the 1990s and I like to preserve these...
Physical drives don't typically last 3 decades, unless you get extremely lucky, so there must be casually-recurring rotation from one drive to the next. That's just how it is. Unlike physical books and printed photographs, a lot of work must be done all the time to preserve integrity. Otherwise, information gets altogether lost, not just degraded quality-wise (colours of photographs always change over time, but a lot more slowly than irrecoverable changes/CRC errors on optical/magnetic storage surfaces).
Doing backups in UNIX or GNU/Linux is actually very simple because everything is a file and copying of files can be done with a single command, the same for tarring, compression, or copying over network pipes (e.g. rsync, scp). Drive encryption is also a command, not some very complex program: cryptsetup -y -v luksFormat /dev/sdXN (this can be changed later)
People who say "Linux is hard" are likely thinking of tasks that Windows users never do at all, e.g. encryption. Microsoft's framework for encryption in Windows is back-doored [1, 2], but the same crackpots [1, 2] who pushed "secure" boot down your throat keep lying about that. They try hard to obfuscate the simple facts. They cannot get very basic tasks done and then they boast about their own incompetence to the entire world:
Yes, trust this guy on security! █