Put Rescuezilla 2.5 on a bootable key – before you need it A fresh release of Rescuezilla, a free Ubuntu-based rescue disk for imaging the drives of a sickly computer, is available. Rescuezilla 2.5 is a handy tool to have around, even if you are lucky and you never need it. The new version is based on the latest Ubuntu 24.04, updates several of its components, and also includes a new …
To avoid near-simultaneous media failure, use backup disc sets or backup tape sets made by different manufacturers, or, if by the same manufacturer, from different lots.
This works well, until you or someone else fat-fingers a command, and/or or mislabels a medium, resulting in one corrupted backup, and one outdated backup.
There will always be a need for recovery tools.
Or you could recognize what this tool is useful for, which is not exactly the same as the set of things a backup is useful for. Yes, there are some times where you might use either, such as if the disk gets corrupted. Of course, you might not have a backup that's fully up-to-date. A backup from Tuesday is wonderful and will rescue you from plenty of things, but before you restore it, maybe you want to use a tool to try to recover Wednesday's files. If you back up every night religiously, then substitute 8:30 for Tuesday and noon for Wednesday.
Maybe, though, you are doing something else. For example, helping someone else who doesn't have backups. Then you might prefer these tools over a backup of your computer. Or maybe you want to restore your backups, and you need some software to make that fast. Or you don't need to restore a disk, but just fix a file, and rather than spending hours restoring your full disk backup then a bit longer catching things up, you just fix the file and go on your way.
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For file backup use Restic: https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
It is not a track by track disk backup as a boot disk but is free open source file backup and works on unix, linix, and Windows. It does deduplication and file compression to local disk or to lots of clouds. I have not heard of anyone putting it on a phone but if you can get the phone's files to your workstation then restic can then back them up.
Recovery works.
I'd really recommend this - it restores to other media so you don't risk further damage to anything remaining on the card and doesn't just find images. On a couple of bucket list trips, I've been bought a lot of beers for saving people's holiday photos.
Has once required a sort of bash shell game when I noticed I was recovering a lot of pictures of a scantily clad lady who I guessed from his expression wasn't the lady officially accompanying the camera owner on this trip.
I normally use Acronis here.
Incidentally a forensic level clone is useful but not always effective especially on mechanical drives.
Any sort of problem such as a partially shorted winding on the actuator arm or intermittent power will interfere with a clone.
Running it in "Reverse Mode" ie last sector first normally catches these.
That's all well and good, but stick Puppy and Slax on there as well.
Had a couple of servers at a customer site infested with a virus that had dumped three million files on one machine.
Because of timezone difference there was no way of re-installing as all the licence keys were generated by somebody working UK office hours.
Couldn't even open the full directory from a lightweight Linux WM.
Take lots of tools, as many as you can carry.
Remember to also carry CD, DVD, and floppy diskette media versions of your tools, as well as a floppy with a program that chain-boots to CD, because some old BIOSes don't support booting from CD.
If you're dealing with a FireWire-capable Macintosh, a bootable portable FireWire drive and Target Disc Mode are your friends.
(/me remembers toggling in the DEC RIM loader via front-panel switches, then using that to read in the BIN loader from paper tape via Teletype ASR-33, then using the BIN loader to read in the paper tape with BASIC. Approximately 20 minutes from power-on to DEC 4K BASIC's "Delete trigonometric functions?" prompt.)
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