HackyHour No. 14

Backup Strategy

Presenter: Nils Seipel
Disclaimer: He’s not an expert and presents just his own considerations and results.
Summary: Christian Krippes

Backup Rules:

The best backup is useless if you don’t backup regularly
Every backup is better than no backup -> Keep it simple and usable!

While the following summary holds some points to consider in order to make backups, you should not wait until you planed it perfect.
Instead, if you have no backups yet, start now and improve over time.
A start can be simple: by make copies of important data on an external hard drive.

Data

What data do we have?
How important is the respective data to us?
How long do we need or want to keep the data?
How often does the data change?
How bad would it be if we lost the data?
Where do we store the data?

Data analysis

You can write your results from above in tabular form to get an overview.

Here is a small example; you may have to adjust it to your needs.

Data	Location	Retention Period	Value	Changes	Security	Backup Medium	Backup Interval
Projects	Laptop	forever	high	daily	very high	external HDD 1, external HDD 2, Cloud Storage	daily
eBooks	Laptop, eBook-Reader	irrelevant	low	monthly	low		monthly

Risk scenarios

Fire in your apartment: External hard drive and analog picture are gone.
Laptop theft: All your data is gone, except external and cold backups, e.g., in the cloud.
Encryption trojan: Cloud and laptop data is gone.
Your hard drive stops working: All data is gone? Recovery might be possible.

Backup media selection and storage

Considerations:

Retention period: 1 or 100 years
Resistance against external impacts
- Light
- Shock
- Air humidity
Stock locations:
- Bank safe deposit box
- Friends

Backup media

A general order of recommendations could be.

A HDD is nearly always a good choice.
Blu-ray with archive quality can be useful for long-term storage
In a company environment, you should invest in and use tape storage
If you want to use an SSD, do some research on your hardware and potential failures especially if you want to store data for the long-term.
Don’t use USB sticks or SD cards. They do not last very long.

Backup Strategies

Popular strategy: 3-2-1
- 3 copies on 2 different media, 1 offsite copy
- general rule: make sure that not all backups are in the same place.
Do it regularly
One backup should be cold which means you keep it unplugged most of the time. Obviously, not when you backup your data.
Copies that could fall into the hands of others should be encrypted! This is not exclusive for backups but also applies to USB sticks, data in the cloud etc.

Recovery Plan

Check if you can recover from your backup; otherwise, it’s useless
In case you have to recover, check for
- Do you have access to your passwords
- Do you have all necessary tools
- How long does it take to get you back to work?

Data integrity

While stored data can get corrupted, which can lead to total or partial data loss.
Make sure your backup tool checks for data integrity.

Tools and further readings

There is a huge selection of tools that help you to automate huge parts of the backup process; see the link below.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Synchronization_and_backup_programs

If you work at JLU there are some tools and solutions already available to you that may help you. You can find an overview of the available services of the HRZ at the following link( german): https://www.uni-giessen.de/de/fbz/svc/hrz/svc/daten

The research data management website also has a FAQ on the topic, which you can find here: https://www.uni-giessen.de/ub/en/digitales-publizieren-en/researchdata/faq-en#anchor_where-do-I-store-my-data-during-my-work-process

Augmented reality in veterinary teaching

Anounced title: Horse skull model in augmented reality Presenter: Daria Hennrichs and Viet Duc Vu Summary: Christian Krippes

Both work for NWTmed - “Science and technology in medicine”
Interdisciplinary platform for “research-based learning”
Provides VR course called “VRmed”
Study projects with VR and AR glasses by students

Reasons for Augmented Reality

Huge benefits in teaching,

creative - can create content based on local requirements
interactive - models can be changed, bones can be removed, etc.
accessability of larger objects (e.g., horse skeleton), which otherwise couldn’t be made accessible to a broader audience due to size, fragility, or other limitations.
intuitive - zoom and rotate as like a picture

Goal

Manipulation and observation of the individual bone structures in AR

Interaction between user and model based on eye-tracking.
Interactive skull

Techology

A 3D-model of a horse skull by Prof.Dr.Staszyk.
A Microsoft Hololens 2 to view the horse skull
Unity Engine to prepare the model to work interactively
Mixed Reality Toolkit 3, a toolkit for Unity to enable operation with input from the Hololens.

Eye tracking interaction

In unity a so called “Object Manipulator” can follow your eye motion (gaze).
A C# script processes this information and changes the color of a tooth when you focus it. It also presents a panel with detailed information like name, location and material composition.

Goals for the future

Extension of eye tracking
Viewpoint display for simultaneous tracking on the computer
Improve interaction
Add more information to panels
Add audio information
Enable “sliceable” models