Nine

MacOS, nearly everyone who does anything with development or ops is using a MacBook. Though lately more “normal” employees have been getting MacBooks too.

In the HAM Radio world we use them. But we also use our own infrastructure. I have mine set to let me know when something happens that needs my attention asap. Only works around my stuff or other HAMs that have stuff tied into our system. So not useful outside narrow circumstances.

Waaaaay better.

Restic allows you to make dedupe snapshots of your data. Everything is there and it’s damn hard to loose anything. I use backblaze b2 as my long term end point / offsite… some will use AWS glacier. But you don’t have to use any cloud services. You can just have a restic repository on some external drives. That’s what I use for my second copy of things. I also will do an annual backup to a hard disk that I leave with a friend for a second offsite copy.

I’ve been backing up all of my stuff like this for years now. I used to use BORG which is another great tool. But restic is more flexible with allowing multiple systems to use a single repository and has native support for things like B2 that BORG doesn’t.

We also use restic to backup control nodes for some of supercomputing clusters I manage. It’s that rock solid imho.

To be honest, there’s a few good comments linking to scripts and methods here to batch convert them on a windows pc/vm. That’s the best way to go.

To add on to their comments. If you’re just interested in preserving them then maybe printing them to pdf, specifically pdf/a, would be my approach once you got them opened.

I’ll leave this one here for someone:

You can tunnel L2 over OpenVPN. Just bridge your interfaces in both sides and it works.

That way if you need to provision a VOIP phone or just have something NetBoot remotely. Not that I recommend doing that…

I thought they were already???

Like how/why wouldn’t they be public? Even if the data isn’t readily accessible via a gui it’s gotta be somewhere so that federation works. Unless you’ve been thirsty in your main it shouldn’t be a problem?

Am I missing something?

Hey now! We got to know why god needs a starship! 😂

Like Star Trek movies 😂

This is why every JR Engineer I’ve mentored is handed a copy of Sysadmin Code Ethics day one along with a copy of Practice of System and Network Administration.

We really need a more formal process for having the title of engineer and we really need a guild. LOPSA/USENIX and CWA are from what I can tell the closest to having anything. Because eventually some congress person is going to get visited by the good idea fairy and try to come down on our profession. So it’s up to us to get our house in order before they do.

I don’t know about that. In the HPC space we use a lot of EL distros. Mainly Centos & now Rocky. Most of the nodes run the os in ram too. Though almost all those kind of systems have no internet connection and don’t use things like crowdstrike. I’ve worked for a few places where the only part of the company that used windows was the office staff eg accounting, hr, etc. everything else is/was using an EL distro or upstream of one eg Fedora. Those type of places usually don’t mess things like crowdstrike for a lot of different reasons eg the kind of data they’re processing and security requirements on that data.

Depends on your management solutions. Intel vPro can allow remote access like that on desktops & laptops even if they’re on WiFi and in some cases cellular. It’s gotta be provisioned first though.

So when’s the last time you touched some grass? It’s a lovely day outside. Maybe go to a pet shelter and see some puppies? Are you getting enough fiber? Drinking enough water? Why not call a friend and hang out?

Restic

And NextDNS too!!

Like everyone has said there’s way better ways of doing it.

HOWEVER if you wanted to use dd you totally could. I’d recommend piping into something like gzip/zstd to save some space though.

dd if=/dev/sda | gzip >/mnt/backup_disk/sda.gz

You could also use restic backup the raw block device too.

That being said, clonezilla is exactly what you want

Don’t worry a quick google search will tell us to use a non toxic glue mixed with vanta black to keep privacy intact

Yes & No.

From what I remember from that time it wasn’t really a lot of people going on about privacy at that time. We were more concerned with how they just grabbed the BSD networking stack without saying anything about it.

There were a few things w/rt activation that people were pissed about. That was more towards the XP era though.

Though maybe someone else remembers it differently than I do since I wasn’t paying attention to privacy at that point and I don’t remember seeing anything about it in PCMAG or G4

I’ve always trusted them to do what they’re great at… which is get a product nearly 100% perfect, then back it up about 20%, and polish it off by shooting themselves in the foot.

Which I’ve always found it insane that EVERY product they ship is like that. The only exceptions (IMHO) to that were Office, DOS5, Win7, (Maybe XP)

lol, yeah that’s an important asterisk for sure!

That’s what IPFS is for. It’s ideal for that kind of stuff