Over the years, Iâve become convinced, that âbackupsâ are a bad paradigm, and should be left to edge-cases. We should instead focus on âsynchronizationâ where possible.
Where backups say âmake a copy, on tape, place it in the basement, and lock it tightâ, they immediately have to follow this statement with ââŚand remember to test your backupsâ. When people inevitably fail to test their backups, the blame is laid on the people taking backups, not on the paradigm itself.
Consider, by comparison, git. Every software project gets copied from one machine to another, using git. As a result, they cannot ever be lost.
So we should have two separate paradigms: if you only need data integrity and donât want to use anything, it just needs checked with a hash sum, and you can lock another copy in the basement every few years. But for useful projects, for code or databases, or anything you actually work with, synchronization seems to do a much better job.