From: nospam@needed.invalid   
      
   On Tue, 9/2/2025 6:46 PM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:   
   > On Tue, 2 Sep 2025 16:26:18 +0100, Jeff Layman wrote:   
   >   
   >> ... but when I plugged in the USB stick and tried "Restore" it   
   >> reported that there were no backups! I thought the whole point of   
   >> having a backup is that it would be easy to restore to a new HD if   
   >> the old one had failed.   
   >   
   > This is why you need to test your backup system by doing an actual   
   > restore. Without that, you don’t actually have a backup system.   
   >   
      
   The last backup system I calibrated in this way, it did not work   
   initially, until I understood what scenarios it would back up   
   and what scenarios it could not handle.   
      
   This is why we do calibration (grrr...).   
      
   There are some topics in computing, you don't leave to chance.   
   Because nobody else really cares whether you lost all those   
   old photos or whatever. Only you care enough, to put in the work.   
      
   If you have no calibrated materials at all, you know that "dd" disk dump   
   can make a physical layer copy of a drive. Store that away somewhere,   
   and you can restore that later. And, it will work. Before I got my   
   very first backup package calibrated, that is what I used for   
   my reference copy. So nothing could go wrong.  Using "dd" is   
   not efficient, it's slow, it takes hours, but this is how   
   you build your "trust mountain", with a solid brick at the bottom.   
   You need at least one thing that you trust, as you start your   
   calibration effort.   
      
   Another thing that would really help, is a utility that can   
   "tell you if two things are equal". And sadly, those aren't   
   always available.   
      
      Paul   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)