I used to write to DVD’s, but the failure rate was astronomical - like 50% after 5 years, some with physical separation of the silvering. Plus today they’re so relatively small they’re not worth using.

I’ve gone through many iterations and currently my home setup is this:

• I have several systems that make daily backups from various computers and save them onto a hard drive inside one of my servers.
• That server has an external hard drive attached to it controlled by a wifi plug controlled by home assistant.
• Once a month, a scheduled task wakes up that external hdd and copies the contents of the online backup directory onto it. It then turns it off again and emails me “Oi, minion. Backups complete, swap them out”. That takes five minutes.
• Then I take the usb disk and put it in my safe, removing the oldest of 3 (the classic, grandfather, father, son rotation) from there and putting that back on the server for next time.
• Once a year, I turn the oldest HDD into an “Annual backup”, replacing it with a new one. That stops the disks expiring from old age at the same time, and annual backups aren’t usually that valuable.

Having the hdd’s in the safe means that total failure/ransomware takes, at most, a month’s worth. I can survive that. The safe is also fireproof and in another building to the server.

This sort of thing doesn’t need to be high capacity HDDs either - USB drives and micro-SD cards are very capable now. If you’re limited on physical space and don’t mind slower write times (which when automating is generally ok), the microSd’s and clear labelling is just as good. You’re not going to kill them through excessive writes for decades.

I also have a bunch of other stuff that is not critical - media files, music. None of that is unique and can be replaced. All of that is backed to a secondary “live” directory on the same pc - mostly in case of my incompetence in deleting something I actually wanted. But none of that is essential - I think it’s important to be clear about what you “must save” and what is “nice to save”

The clear thing is to sit back and work out a system that is right for you. And it always, ALWAYS should be as automated as you can make it - humans are lazy sods and easily justify not doing stuff. Computers are great and remembering to do repetitive tasks, so use that.

Include checks to ensure the backed up data is both what you expected it to be, and recoverable - so include a calendar reminder to actually /read/ from a backup drive once or twice a year.

It even has the approval of my wife.

He is the chosen one! Hail him!

Never say never - unless you’re writing clickbait.

I’m inclined to give Linux more benefit of the doubt than, say, Windows. That’s because of the motives behind it.

Microsoft have a very long history of making design choices in their software that users don’t like, and quite often that’s because it suits their interests more than their customers. They are a commercial business that exists to benefit itself, after all. Same with Apple. Money spoils everything pure, after all. You mention privacy, but that’s just one more example of someone wanting to benefit financially from you - it’s just in a less transparent and more open-ended way than paying them some cash.

Linux, because that monetary incentive is far less, is usually designed simply “to be better”. The developers are often primary users of the software. Sure - sometimes developers make choices that confuses users, but that over-arching driving business interest just isn’t there.

The point people are making is that communication and discipline, both things that require time and skill, would be a better, less invasive approach.

Perhaps that’s being done as well?

But even if it is, that approach doesn’t work with all people, no matter how skillful or how much time is put into it.

If it did, then the world would be a perfect place by now. Indeed, many things are better - but there’s enough people hard at work sowing discontent and hate to ensure it isn’t.

Bless you for being an optimist, but I don’t think it works like that. I really wish it did though.

True - although just because you are paranoid, that doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you…

Agree - after they started bundling adware in downloads (2013ish?), all the decent projects seemed to move to github en masse.

Those projects that stayed were mostly already stagnant, or the maintainers didn’t use git and didn’t want to learn, or had some other reason that allowed them to accept advertising on their work.

Simple and reliable has a lot to be said for it.

(Ignoring the ageist and sexist “old men” statements in this thread because it’s irrelevant)

They will die out,

… and be replaced with other technically invested people who are resistant to change. Such as with every massive project ever - at least until you get a tyrant who ignores the feelings and work of of others and is in a position to push through their own vision.

And hopefully will continue to be asked, because one day it may not be poor OPSEC.

The BBC still uses it to break news, I’m saddened to say.

OP is on OpenWRT

Fair point - I missed that, buried in the comments as it was.

In that scenario, you use what’s available, I guess.

OP said they just want to copy a binary around. Can you do that with perl?

This is linux. Someone will have done it.

Wow, you’re a dick.

Try it now - go on. Type “perl” and tell me what you get.

And if you’re so certain it’s not used, try removing it and see how well your computer works afterwards.

I work at scale - deploying scripts to hundreds of linux machines and any package you install will be multiplied that many times on the backend storage. You don’t get the luxury of installing anything that isn’t essential.

Try it now - type perl. It’s a dependency on a huge amount of core system tools.

Can’t say I’ve noticed much pain beyond what I mention - powershell just works.

Um, exactly the opposite on all the distros I use. All Enterprise Linux distros, Suse and Debian.