My company uses Acronis M365 Backup Protection.

I believe it was selected because the licensing options and costs were much better than Veeam’s offering.

To be honest I can’t comment much further - it was set up by a colleague, it runs in a different country, and I’ve never needed to do a restore from it because I’ve always been able to recover lost files/emails from the recycle bin/recoverable items.

It’s more of an insurance policy against ransomware or other malware than anything else. It’s good to have, but not used day to day.

Although that does remind me that we are probably due a test restore. I’ll add that to the list for this month. Thanks! 😉

It’s fine.

Like any CMS, it has a seemingly constant low level of patching to be applied. The more third party modules and themes you have, the worse that gets.

Remove unused modules that aren’t core. Same with themes. That’ll make things easier.

Otherwise it’s overheads are just Apache/nginx, MySQL/MariaDb, and maintenance of the TLS certificate, plus OS patching. All fairly well understood stuff that you should have no issues with.

My local backups are handled by rdiff-backup to a mirror set of disks. That means my data is versioned but easily accessible for immediate restore, and now on three disks (my SSD, and two rotating rust drives). It also makes restores as simple as copying a file if I want the latest version, or an easy command if I want an older version. And testing backups is as easy as a diff command to compare the backup version with the live version.

Having your files just be files in your backup solution is very handy. At work I don’t mind having to use an application like Veeam, because I’m being paid to do that. At home I want to see my backups quickly and easily, because I’d rather be working on my files than wrestling with backup software…

Remote backups are handled by SpiderOak, who have been fine for me for almost a decade. I also use them to synchronise my desktop and laptop computer. On my desktop SpiderOak also backs up some files in an archive area on the rotating rust mirror set - stuff that’s large and I don’t access often, so don’t need to put on my laptop but do want backed up.

I also have a USB thumbdrive that’s encrypted and used when I’m travelling to back up changes on my laptop via a simple rsync copy - just in case I have limited internet access and SpiderOak can’t do its thing…

I did also have a NAS in the mix once, but I realised that it was a waste of energy - both mine and electricity. In normal circumstances my data is on 5 locations (desktop SSD, laptop SSD, desktop mirror set, SpiderOak’s storage) and in the very worst case it’s in two locations (laptop SSD, USB thumbdrive). Rdiff-backup to the NAS was simply overkill once I’d added the local mirror set into my desktop, so I retired it.

I’d added the local mirror set because I was working with large files - data sets and VM images - and backups over the network to the NAS were taking an age. A local set of cheap disks in my desktop tower was faster and yet still fairly cheap.

Here’s my advice for your consideration:

• Simple is better than complicated.
• How you restore is more important than how you backup; perform test restores regularly.
• Performance matters; backups that take ages are backups you won’t run.
• Look to meet the 3-2-1 criteria; 3 copies, on 2 different storage systems, with at least 1 in a different geographic location. Cloud storage helps with this.

Good luck with your backup strategy!

Absolutely - rdiff-backup onto a local mirror set of disks. As you say, the big advantage is that the last “current” entry in the backup is available just by browsing, but I have a full history just a command away. Backups are no use if you can’t access them, and people really under-rate ease of access when evaluating their backup strategy.

I think the thing to take away from this is the poor state of management/maintenance tools that Exchange had. Thankfully over the years this has improved, but in those early years it was pretty bad.

I was using both Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino in that period. If the same thing had happened in Notes, we’d just shut down the mail router task, open the mail.box database and remove the offending message. Easy. But that can only be done because Notes re-used its database system for everything, including the mail queue.

Exchange has a history of reinventing the wheel even within its own architecture. Let’s just say I’mm very grateful that we’re now on Microsoft 365 and these things are Microsoft’s problem, not mine… 😉

A friend recommended Reddit, I signed up in 2012 but the interface was… uninspiring. Especially on mobile. Out of curiosity I tried Sync in 2013 because it was getting very good reviews, and immediately preferred it.

I’ve never been a heavy Reddit user, but did most of my usage through Sync. It was just better.

Somewhat ironically I’ve recently been thinking about doing more in some Reddit communities, but the awful behaviour of Reddit means that won’t happen now. So I’m really looking forward to seeing Sync for Lemmy so that I can pursue those goals here in comfort and style! 😉