Features - QOTW: Do you create regular backups?

[HonestFlames]

On my workstation, my entire user folder is on a RAID1 of a couple of 500GB WD RE4 drives.

Anything particularly important is shoved into my Dropbox, which syncs with my laptop, workstation and mobile phone.

Photo's I take on my phone automatically go into Dropbox and sync to my Google+ account.

I run a couple of Minecraft servers, which also run from a couple of WD RE4 drives and are backed up hourly to a cheap 2TB drive.

I don't run full system backups. Would rather just reinstall my OS if anything happens.

[Dark Knight]

I would like to create backups of my OS however I can't stay the windows 7 backup tool which doesn't seem able to backup to a specific folder but to the source of the drive which litters it with file after file making things look organised.

What I do now is just backup my important documents to a separate hard drive and USB. I would love to have a mirrored drive but I just don't know how to setup.

[watercooled]

RAID/mirrored drive isn't backup. As I've said countless times before - it protects against a single point of failure, i.e. a single HDD physically failing. It does nothing whatsoever against the countless other causes of data loss, e.g. power supply failure destroying both drives, viruses, program bugs, accidental overwrite/deletion, etc - RAID will just immediately 'backup' the unwanted changes. Also worth noting, bit rot normally goes unnoticed in RAID as it doesn't do any checksumming. Generally the extra drives are being wasted in anything but an uptime-critical commercial environment, stick them in a USB caddy and use them for real backups instead.

I've seen far too many people fall victim to the assumption RAID=backup, losing lots of important data in the process. In fact it's relatively rare I see someone losing data due to HDD failure now, but I frequently hear of other causes...

[Andrew McP]

For quite a long time I have upgraded my HD every 18 months or so. The old disk becomes a backup for the new one, with Acronis being used to mirror the C: drive and crunch the rest. And the best thing I did to make this more convenient was add a USB3 card and get a USB3 dock. That cuts down the backup time considerably, and the more convenient something is the more likely I am to do it.

I don't have offline backup, but cloud storage for the really important stuff (rather than stuff it would be inconvenient to lose) partially solves that issue.

[Phage]

USB 3.0 external disk run from a small card. A few photos are also on usb sticks around the place.

[Vimeous]

Yes
I currently moving all my non-volitile data into a NAS which has its own eSATA connected 2TB drive for backup. I use Synology's tools to run a full backup thrice weekly.
I also intend to store a periodically refreshed system image of our main PC's on the NAS but that's not in place yet.

Day-to-day differentials for individual PCs are going back on separate 1TB portables.

As for others though I really should get a fireproof safe for the backup drives.
Thing is it's not as though the data would stop me living if it was lost. However the amount of time that's been invested in generating the data is worth protecting, it 'd take years to replicate. Even then the photographs that are irreplaceable.

[gagaga]

RAID/mirrored drive isn't backup. As I've said countless times before - it protects against a single point of failure, i.e. a single HDD physically failing. It does nothing whatsoever against the countless other causes of data loss, e.g. power supply failure destroying both drives, viruses, program bugs, accidental overwrite/deletion, etc - RAID will just immediately 'backup' the unwanted changes. Also worth noting, bit rot normally goes unnoticed in RAID as it doesn't do any checksumming. Generally the extra drives are being wasted in anything but an uptime-critical commercial environment, stick them in a USB caddy and use them for real backups instead.

I've seen far too many people fall victim to the assumption RAID=backup, losing lots of important data in the process. In fact it's relatively rare I see someone losing data due to HDD failure now, but I frequently hear of other causes...

^ this. RAID=availability, BACKUP=backup. I've also had so much crap from RAID 5 failures including one that trashed the config tracks at the start of the array. Not much fun spending a weekend with a pad of paper, a pen and a sector HEX reader to calculate the offsets and arrangement of the disks for manual recovery.

[crossy]

My Windows box is well backed up - using the OS backup tool to create backups to a dedicated 2TB drive in the same box. I've also got a WD NAS and the software that came with that (Memeo) gets a shot every so often (I really, really need to do this more often)

At the moment though, my Linux boxes and my wife's laptop aren't backed up (although some of the data, like mails etc, are).

That said, I'm coming around to the way of thinking that a cloud backup would be a better idea - my employer uses this, and it seems to work fine. Initially I was looking at Carbonite but while that's unlimited storage, it's a personal account - so having to have one for each system to be covered could be a real pain - and very expensive to boot.

Recently I've been looking at other stuff - specifically Mozy - but they all seem to be Windows-only. That said, I recently discovered CrashPlan+, which not only seems to have a family plan (yay!) but also includes Linux support (double yay). http://www.crashplan.com/consumer/compare.html. Only thing that's putting me off is that there doesn't seem to be a lot of information out there about the company - no track record when you're committing all your data to them is not a good sign.

[AlexGTR]

I have copys of important docuiments on another hard drive but i dont back anything else up like music, videos etc.

*Touch wood* I havent had a failure where i have lost everything, but i have had failures before.

[Shooty*]

Yes.

Since being burgled about 8 years ago and losing a load of photos which I had not backed up, I now always have a portable 2.5 inch hard drive with my photos and music on it. I don't back up documents: frankly, in my personal life I don't create any documents which need backing up. I have traditionally used WD Passports, but I don't like the latest iteration, so I currently have a 1tb Intenso drive, which I like.

In addition... in case THAT fails, I also back up photos and music to a naked SATA drive which I connect to my PC through a hot swap CD-drive-bay thing.

Further still, I also have all my DVD ripped into VIDEO_TS folders on my server. And this is where I get a little crazy OCD, so bear with me. I own the DVDs, but because I have taken the time to rip them onto my machine, remove unnecessary languages and trailers with CloneDVD, strip out any other rubbish with VOBBlanker, edit the menu navigation with PGC-Edit, download and fine tune the metadata for MediaBrowser, download and edit the folder and background images from TMDB, my movie collection is something of a labour of love (and repeating all that would take ages), I back that up, too. Regularly.

I have quite a few hard drives stacked in the corner of my office, as a result. No point leaving them at home, as I see it: if someone's going to nick the server, or if the house is going to burn down, best to have them stored somewhere else.

I use AllwaySync.

[Mattus]

My documents folder is synced with Dropbox. There's nothing like the peace of mind you get from knowing that if you had a sudden hard drive failure, you'd scarcely lose any critical work at all. It's a completely different feeling to even daily backups.

I back my photos up to an external hard drive. Also my music - although I could re-rip the vast majority of it from CD, the sheer time and effort that would entail makes it worth having backups.

I don't back up anything else. Anything which I can simply download again, I tend to just leave.

[badass]

I work for a Backup vendor , so yes

I use said backup vendors software for my home backups!
My home environment is a little unusual though

[Barry]

All the backup/storage drives are cloned on the 2 pcs and laptop in the house but important things such as family photos are backed up to blue-ray discs and USB pen drives

[phili_c51]

i use HP Proliant Microserver
http://www.ebuyer.com/281915-hp-proliant-turion-ii-n40l-microserver-100-cashback-658553-421)
Best £150 i ever spent! 4Gb RAM and 4X 2Tb Samsung Spinpoint F3 (which were bought from scan £105 for 2 just before prices rose!)

[Saracen]

RAID/mirrored drive isn't backup. ...

I've seen far too many people fall victim to the assumption RAID=backup, losing lots of important data in the process. In fact it's relatively rare I see someone losing data due to HDD failure now, but I frequently hear of other causes...

I'd entirely agree that it isn't backup, but where data is RAIDed, it does add a degree of resilience, which may change the nature of any backup strategy.

Any backup strategy is always a balance of several factors, including the value and importance of the data, the cost of the backup solution and hassle and inconvenience of backup.

At one end of the spectrum, you may have mirrored servers and an auto-switching duplexer. That backs up all data instantaneously, and of course, allows work to continue uninterrupted (though with a drop in resilience) if the primary dies. And then, you'd have periodic backup, a rotation system and off-site storage, fire-proof (and maybe flood-proof) safes, and so on. Or at the very extreme end, an entire duplicate of a data centre, generators to proof against power cuts, and even bomb-proof buildings. I even know of one data centre that, due to it's locations (and way before 9/11) was claimed to be able to withstand a direct hit from a 747.

It's always that calculation of risk versus cost, etc, and though I'd entirely agree that RAID is not backup, to might change the backup regime, and in cases where any data lost isn't really a problem, it might be enough. For example, I have a workstation for a particular project. NO data on it is irreplaceable, and I rely on RAID to keep that machine running, on the basis that it it fails, I can replace a drive, and if the worst happens, I'll rebuild the machine and re-install the OS. That's as far as it's worth going, given the absence of any actual data worth protecting.

RAID is a tool in the toolbox, but is absolutely not a substitute for RAID if the data at risk is either valuable, or irreplaceable, or if the time of a rebuild is too high, or the machine is doing an important function where a delay in availability is a serious problem.

[Skywalker]

Nope. Pretty much everything I have on my HDD's is easily replaceable plus I never see HDD die in snap of a fingers. Although its not impossible I guess.