DigitalDilemma

You’re welcome.

Yes, you can create a list of files that takes little space, in linux that’s just “tree” to produce a list of directories and files (I don’t know about Windows, sorry)

But only you can answer what you need to back up. If you judge the effort to re-download this data is more than the effort of backing it up (especially if you’re on a slow link), then backing it up makes more sense. Everyone has their own appetite for risk and their own shape of what they can spend in both time and money in sorting this. The important thing is that you’re thinking about it before you need it, that’s good!

A pet subject of mine.

Firstly - sit down and consider what you need to backup.

• Tier 1 - unique data. Stuff you created that doesn’t exist elsewhere.
• Tier 2 - Stuff that would take a few days to repeat. Local configs, etc.
• Tier 3 - Stuff you can just download again. (Steam library, media etc)

Don’t backup Tier 3. I’m betting the size of data you need to back up shrinks a lot.

Secondly - automate it. If there’s anything manual, then you’ll eventually stop doing it. Automate, automate, automate - and throw in some manual or automated checks of the backups to verify they’re actually usable.

Thirdly - airgap it if you can, and if there’s much Tier 1 data. Offline disks. This gives you some protection against ransomware. Consider the risks and how to protect yourself. Obviously media failure, accidental deletion and ransomware, but also consider theft and fire. Do you really want your backups in the same location? Do they need encryption?

I wrote quite a long blog on the subject if you’re interested in more.

His interfering with European politics is despised over here - promoting far-right groups in Germany, France and the UK deliberately to destabilise our countries. The man is genuinely dangerous to all democracies, not just the US.

A real passion project.

Good on you!

Already done, along with a bunch of other stuff including cloudflare WAF and rate limiting rules.

I am still annoyed that it took me over a day’ of my life to finally (so far) restrict these things. And several other days to offload the problem to Cloudflare pages for sites that I previous self hosted but my rural link couldn’t support.

this advice is just for “unintentional” DDoS attacks, not intentionally malicious ones.

And I don’t think these high volume AI scrapes are unintentional DDOS attacks. I consider them entirely intentional. Not deliberrately malicious, but negligent to the point of criminality. (Especially in requesting the same pages again so frequently, and all of them ignoring robots.txt)

Surprised at the level of negativity here. Having had my sites repeatedly DDOSed offline by Claudebot and others scraping the same damned thing over and over again, thousands of times a second, I welcome any measures to help.

That would increase the prices in the exporting countries. It’s not as if there’s such a huge surfeit that they’re being destroyed.

Over the past year Musk has removed all masks and clearly believes he can operate beyond the law. His motives are clearly to watch the world burn. He is an extremely dangerous, unpredictable and powerful man, threatening democracy across the globe.

Our governments need to protect us from him. Brazil’s being brave here, I hope they’re just the first.