Backup Island Strategy

Finally settled on a good, sustainable (feeling) strategy for achieving the 3-2-1 Rule for File Backups.

Islands Strategy

I’m making a folder called “Island”, which has my backups in it. The island folder is split into two parts - one titled “Cold Storage” and other dated with the ISO 8601 month.

"Backup Island" Folder

A folder, replicated in multiple places, consisting of 2 subfolders:

• Cold Storage = merge file & don’t overwrite pre-existing files
• YYYY-MM = create new snapshot containing current versions, retain old snapshots

flowchart TD
    c(Content)
    subgraph Island
        A(Snapshots)
        B(Cold Store)
    end
    c --new copy--> A
    c --merged--> B
    NAS
    Island --"copied to"--> NAS
    Island --"copied to"--> p[Portable HDD]
    p --"copied to"--> e[Old Computer]

Cold Storage

Cold storage is for files that don’t change often. Things that, once they exist, they are pretty much “done”. These are the vast majority of files by storage size.

• media - what’s in my Plex + some books & audiobooks
• documents - copy of my “documents” folder, essentially all of which will never change (e.g. Scans of physical documents)

YYYY-MM Snapshots

These are folders that contain files that are rapidly changing. The kinds of things you would want to retain some history on, in case of latent accidental deletions in the working directories. For me that’s my blog, my notes, my PDW data, and Obsidian-based journal.