Backups...?

[malfunction]

Morning all,

Just wondering what (if anything) you're all using for backups.

Mine are woefully out of date and largely DVD based (and manually created at that) and I'm currently thinking of moving to dedicated HDD(s) and / or blueray as an extra layer for some of the harder to replace stuff... Though for the cost of that I guess I could probably buy another HP microserver and just leave it powered down when I'm not making or restoring backups.

The largest volume of data I have is video which would be a pain to recreate but isn't exactly a loss as I have all the source material already, and well, they're not exactly a huge loss even if they went forever - I've seen them all already!

The rest is things that are harder to replace - personal photos (the better ones of which are online), a large iTunes collection (yes, I care more about my music than my films) and various documents, etc which even combined is no more than a few hundred GB - i.e. it would easily fit on one HD and I wouldn't need a huge number of blueray discs either.

Thanks in advance...

[b0redom]

I use an HP Microserver running FreeNAS and rsync a load of stuff to that. I am planning syncing to Amazon S3 for stuff which I can't replace - photos etc, but I've not got around to doing that yet.

[OilSheikh]

Why don't you buy a eSATA caddy and a laptop HDD. Simple, eh ?

[oolon]

While having a second copy of things will hopefully prevent accidental deletion and hopefully corruption. (make sure you check things before achiving if you only have one copy). The next biggest risks they don't protect against is thief and fire. You need something off site for that, imaging your backup server to an external drive then storing it somewhere else would be a good move.

[Saracen]

This is, as always, a balance between cost and hassle on the one hand, and how badly you want to avoid losing something on the other.

My method is to break down "data" according to how important it is to me, and what the implications would be if I lost it.

For instance :-

- a download of the latest Ubuntu release - not important, as I can always download again.
- unimportant personal "snapshot" photos - irritating to lose, but oh well.
- important, irreplaceable photos - backed up very thoroughly
- accounting data - I can recreate it all but it's a LOT of time and effort, so thoroughly backed up.

My normal method is to partition hard drives according to how important the content is, then to have a strategy based on how much and how fast it changes. Then, some data is backed up, some archived, and some both. Exactly how is complex. I use a mix of sync software, a RAID server for resilence, and a combination of various tape drives and optical (by which I mean DVD-RAM and even older PD and MO drives).

Personally, I do not entirely trust DVD re-writeables. They are part of my strategy, but never, EVER the last resort. The amount of data I have that's "critical" (to me, anyway) is fairly small, so a periodic full backup and more regular differentials does it for me, and gives me a two-step restore process. My photo collection changes and grows more organically, so I keep the first copy on the machine I'm using them on, a second on that server, and an archive copy on optical disk. And then I have DVD-R copies too, which though they go out of date, I keep them because in the event of a disaster for everything else, at least I've got old and out-of-date (and probably incomplete) copies of much of the material.

And then there's the really important data, like accounting data, which goes through must of the above, but I also keep a copy in a compressed and encrypted file on some personal webspace, secreted in a way that it's most unlikely to be found even if anyone cared enough to look.

Paranoid? Me? Who wants to know? Who? Who are you?

[planet436]

I use an external HD (stored away when not using it specifically) with weekly full backups, incremental daily ones.

Important documents I use Dropbox for added redundancy. The safest way to store backups is offsite with encyption for fire/theft as discussed earlier. Agree with Saracen though about DVD backups, I only use those for OS recovery and various ISOs that I might need in the future.

[m.a.miah]

i use an external usb hdd. i don't really have anything on my laptop that would cause my world to end if i lost it just more of an inconvenience if i lost it. any important photos or documents are backed up on the ex hhd and a hard copy made on cd/dvd discs

[OilSheikh]

After I doing a fresh Windows install and installing all software that I use, I use Macrium Reflect to create an image of the whole drive. Reflect shrinks the partition as well and the end result can be a 6-10GB image file.

Then, every week or month ( depends on how busy I am ) , I copy DESKTOP+MYDOCUMENTS+FAVOURITES+MYMUSIC+MYVIDEOS+MYPICTURES to a laptop SATA HDD after opening up my PC and using a SATA cable. I am looking to go the eSATA/USB3.0 way as I dont want to open up my PC all the time!

[ik9000]

backups? You what?

knew there was something I meant to do... unfortunately my fantastic 640GB Maxtor external HDD which I used to use won't work with windows 7. I'm rather stuck. If anyone knows how to get the Maxtor software running on win7 64 bit then do let me know!

[kalniel]

backups? You what?

knew there was something I meant to do... unfortunately my fantastic 640GB Maxtor external HDD which I used to use won't work with windows 7. I'm rather stuck. If anyone knows how to get the Maxtor software running on win7 64 bit then do let me know!

Can't you just use the windows 7 inbuilt software?

I don't have a NAS, but do have multiple hard drives, so use the windows 7 backup software to keep backups of system image and documents etc. so that there's a minimal level of protection. I don't yet do much backup to off-site locations yet, but that'll come with cloud later.

[badass]

Site 1 - my house. 2 PC's back up to an HP microserver using the WIN7 backup tool.
Backups are replicated to site 2.
Site 2 - 1 HP ML330 G6, Dell poweredge 840 and an HP Microserver. 2x USB external HDD's

VM's on the ML330 G6 and the Microserver are backed up using Veeam to virtual HDD's. Veeam backups are copied to external HDD's.
Vital data is sync'd with site 1

I plan to move the poweredge to a 3rd site that has better upstream bandwidth than the other two.

Probably overkill, TBH

When the missus was doing her postgrad diploma, she had everything on an encryted USB stick. I repeatedly insisted on setting up a sync partnership between that and her PC. The PC is backed up daily to the microserver and the sync only requires a button press.
When a collegue took her USB stick and repeatedly entered the wrong key, wiping all of the data she was most thankful and finally understood why I am so anal about backups.

For you, the easiest way is to get an external HDD and just use Windows 7's built in backup. It's very good and I have confirmed its simplicity in performing a restores as well.
If you have enough upstream bandwidth, it's probably worth periodically sending those backups to some cloud providers space.

[easyrider]

Windows Home Server backups all my client PC's around the house. I have duplication on and backup the server to external Hard drives.

If a drive fails then my data is still safe.

I don't know what I did before getting WHS I love it.

[ik9000]

backups? You what?

knew there was something I meant to do... unfortunately my fantastic 640GB Maxtor external HDD which I used to use won't work with windows 7. I'm rather stuck. If anyone knows how to get the Maxtor software running on win7 64 bit then do let me know!

Can't you just use the windows 7 inbuilt software?

Sadly not - the drive is encrypted using maxtor's joyous software - which worked just fine in XP. Then Seagate bought Maxtor and decided to be lame and no software update was ever issued. The result is that the drive encryption software installs on Win7 but doesn't actually work - it doesn't recognise the drive properly. Seagate's great suggestion is to wipe the drive and use 3rd party software. All well and good but I have a significant amount of data on it which I need.

[FatalSaviour]

My document, pictures and other important folders are all stored on a separate RAID 1 array. I've then just started using an online backup provider to put about 500GB in the cloud, and they store the last 30 revisions of a file.
After having encountered verification issues in the past with RAID arrays, I don't trust them entirely, and of course it doesn't stop me from being an idiot and deleting or corrupting everything myself. Or indeed from fire and theft. Hence the cloud solution. As I haven't tested this fully yet (indeed, it's only uploaded 50GB at the moment, I'll refrain from mentioning or recommending the particular provider I've gone with). However, they were significantly cheaper than other alternatives and providers such as Amazon or Dropbox.

[cam1986]

I backup to an external Hard drive using Synctoy

[Saracen]

....

I don't have a NAS, but do have multiple hard drives, so use the windows 7 backup software to keep backups of system image and documents etc. so that there's a minimal level of protection. I don't yet do much backup to off-site locations yet, but that'll come with cloud later.

I used to do that .... until a power supply blew in a fairly spectacular way (the room stunk of burning electronics for about three weeks) and in the process blew, among other bits, three (of four) hard drive controllers (the board on the drive, not in the PC or on the mobo). And by "blew" the drives, I mean physically blew chunks out the chips leaving scorched holes. Quite how it did it, I still haven't worked out. But it did.

Fortunately, I also had copies, at least of the important bits, on DVD-RAM too.

Personally, I think a considerable improvement on multiple drives in a machine is to use at least an external drive too, because at least it';s immune to PC PSU problems (though not necessarily mains problems, unless it's physically unplugged except when in use.

One option for getting round that is one of those docking stations that takes a bare drive. YOU want to back up, you plug in the drive, back up and remove the drive. And if you alternate drives, you gain another level of resilience. I've got one of those docking stations too, and they're damned useful, but I don't use mine in that way.

But it still comes back to as balance between cost and hassle, and the value of the data at risk.