from Hacker News

Ask HN: When was the last time you lost data?

by dave-at-koor on 6/20/23, 12:52 AM with 4 comments

• by vbezhenar on 6/20/23, 1:13 AM

  Not me, but the company I worked before, recently lost their primary data. They used ancient hardware, ancient software and some proprietary backup solution nobody understands. Their hardware failed, their backups turned out useless so they lost their primary database.

  This database is a collection of other data sources, so they spent few months rebuilding it and doing nothing in the meantime. Kind of worked for them.

  Basically they did every imaginable mistake: they didn't keep things up to date, they used contractors who were hardly professionals, they never tested recovery.

  This worked for them for around 20 years, AFAIK. They had old, but solid hardware and software (HP Itanium servers, HPUX, Oracle 9i, raids), so this thing worked well. That's a lesson as well: good hardware might make you too relaxed.

• by codetrotter on 6/20/23, 1:13 AM

  Around 2011 I set up full disk encryption for the first time. The systems I did this on were some second hand computers that I had bought and installed FreeBSD on. The systems were very stable. Too stable! They were running for several weeks until one day when there was a power outage. When power came back I booted the machines up again and I promptly realised that I was not entirely sure about what the convoluted password I had chosen for full disk encryption was exactly.

  I lost quite a bit of data that day.

  It taught me to stop with silly 5|_|1357:7|_|7:0|\|5 and to use long passphrases instead. This ensures high entropy without the possibility of forgetting symbols chosen, because there are no symbols to remember.

  It also taught me to frequently reboot my computers, so that I remember the passphrases to decrypt the disks.

  I have a tool that I wrote and which I actively use myself for generating passphrases, it’s called Pgen and it’s open source at https://github.com/ctsrc/Pgen