It's so easy to think you have backups when you don't.
I have the following setup: my main machine is Windows and my photos are on a local NTFS drive, that is backed up (mirrored) on a Netgear NAS via rsync; I rotate the backup drives on a weekly basis.
Every time the backup job runs it sends an email to tell me how it went. The email is sent via gmail. This used to work well but at some point (a year ago maybe?) gmail decided this was "unsecure" and stopped forwarding the emails. Instead it sent a notice that "somebody tried to send an email and we blocked it".
I couldn't be bothered to fix it and accepted the gmail warning notice in lieu of the actual Netgear backup report.
Then eventually I upgraded the email notification system... only to find out that the backups were failing systematically.
Luckily nothing was lost as the main drive was fine; I was able to fix the problem and do the backups correctly.
But of course it could easily have gone a different way: the main drive could have failed and with empty mirrors there would have been no solution, and I would have had only myself to blame.
It is so easy to tell oneself that everything is a-okay when it really isn't.
This is like a story where someone says they strap a blindfold on before driving and then the moral is "it's so easy to drive on the wrong side of the road and cause accidents"
Yeah okay, but I should have added that during the (long) time when the emails were being sent correctly, the backups never failed. So I had a high confidence everything was ok.
I don't remember the exact specifics but it had to do with filename encodings. One file had special characters in its name, rsync on Windows (DeltaCopy) was reporting it existing, but it could not be transmitted and so the remote server kept asking for it, or something like that, and after some back and forth the whole process failed.
I have the following setup: my main machine is Windows and my photos are on a local NTFS drive, that is backed up (mirrored) on a Netgear NAS via rsync; I rotate the backup drives on a weekly basis.
Every time the backup job runs it sends an email to tell me how it went. The email is sent via gmail. This used to work well but at some point (a year ago maybe?) gmail decided this was "unsecure" and stopped forwarding the emails. Instead it sent a notice that "somebody tried to send an email and we blocked it".
I couldn't be bothered to fix it and accepted the gmail warning notice in lieu of the actual Netgear backup report.
Then eventually I upgraded the email notification system... only to find out that the backups were failing systematically.
Luckily nothing was lost as the main drive was fine; I was able to fix the problem and do the backups correctly.
But of course it could easily have gone a different way: the main drive could have failed and with empty mirrors there would have been no solution, and I would have had only myself to blame.
It is so easy to tell oneself that everything is a-okay when it really isn't.