QOTW: Do you backup?

[HEXUS]

Something almost everyone ought to do, but how many of us take the time?

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[DOA_Draven]

Yes, been in the IT industry long enough to know it is well worth the few minutes it takes. Personal data is on mirrored drives on the PC, backed up to a second PC on another set of mirrored drives. Also to my online storage, and the very vital stuff also onto an external HDD. All of this and I have never had a HDD let me down, but of course should I stop backing up, I'll bet one fails. As I see it HDD are cheap, my data is worth a fortune in my time and effort.

[[GSV]Trig]

Important stuff on the server is replicated across multiple drives, add to that an external 'grab in emergency' drive (SSD).
Other than that I have stuff in OneDrive, that's about it tbh

[Percy1983]

Absolutely without hesitation every time I use my computer.

I have 2 4TB raid arrays, business and personal.

4TB business is backed up on 2 separate hard drives (work in progress and completed).

and 8TB hard drive backs up both arrays with is the shutdown procedure for the PC

Occasional images are taken of my boot drive on one of the business back up drives and my phone is backed up to my personal drive which is then included on the 8TB backup.

A lot of this is due to being a business machine but also knowing of people who have lost 10 years+ of kids photos etc.

With that I have had 2 hard drives fail over the years and lost very little, and I have moved older backup drives into USB3 enclosures which makes them ok to work from if business critical.

[Friesiansam]

Yes, firstly to an internal drive, secondly to an external back-up drive and a limited amount of important pictures are in a cloud back-up too.

[Rob_B]

None of my machines in full no, but I do occasionally backup photos etc to 2 separate drives. I need to find a cheap backup solution but have never really looked into it.

[Iota]

I set my PC up to do daily backups of important files to an external drive. I repurposed a Samsung Evo Plus 250GB and placed it in a ROG Strix Arion M2 NVMe Enclosure, connected via USB C. It works well enough for my needs and is easy to grab in an emergency.

[AndyM2012]

Yes. Windows File History is on. Backups to external media are taken every week. Work stuff is in version control locally and remotely, and the data is also in several geographically-separate locations.

[Spreadie]

Mirrored array on the NAS, backed up to a couple of large external drives, with an additional backup of the important stuff on a 2TB encrypted SSD that is stored in the car.

[Core2Extreme]

Yes, automatically each week to extra drives connected locally, and about once a month to external drives that are only connected for backup, and which are encrypted. Of the latter, I have two, one of which is stored off site.

It's not 100% foolproof (if a main drive failed now, I'd lose a few days of updates), but has provided a good balance, and is way better than what I did 14 years ago.

Since starting to have good backup processes, I've had one HDD fail (it was the backup), and one PSU failed (didn't kill any other components, but a worse roll of the dice and it could have). No data loss either time, but both good reminders of why I have backup, including not-locally-connected backup.

[mikeo]

Full backups of all my internal SSD's to a couple of large mech HD's once a month.

[Saracen999]

Very definitely, yes.

But not a one-size-fits-all backup. It's more .... structured ... than that. I break data down into categories, based primarily on the type and size of the data, and the frequency with which it changes. And it's importance to me.

For instance, video captures (whether from analog sources from the 80s, or digital video from current cameras) don't change much, if at all, once a project is complete. Depending on what it is about, I might keep 'source captures' (i.e. direct from tape) and final edited video, or just the final project. And for client stuff, there's a limit to how long I'll keep either.

The photo collection tends to grow organically, but the original unedited and edited images, once done, tend to be very static. But WP files, spreadsheets, etc can be changing regularly, and (until I retired) my acounts data was updated constantly.

So, I categorise data into stuff I consider "archive", much of which is archived to MO disks (at least two copies). Other stuff, like photos, tends to be periodically "sync'd", at directory level, and then the backup backed up less frequently. Constantly changing stuff is usually a G-F-S backup, file by file, automatically.

I've used everything over the years from 150MB tape drives back in the 80's, to Jumbo drives, DDS2, DDS3, SLR, MO drives, Plasmon PD drives, and so on. Currently, some data is stored primarily on NAS and backed up from there, other more volatile stff is on PC, and NAS with the NAS sync'd to the various PCs so the data is in several places. NAS's back up to external USB drives, snapshots are enabled and I'm currently contemplating another NAS to add a NAS to NAS layer too.

That's what I mean by "structured".

I work on the simple premise familiar to IT folk - it's not if you'll have a hardware failure, but when. And if it :-

a) matters to you, and
b) isn't backed up,

.... that will be what fails. If you really don't want to, or can't afford to, lose it, back it up. The extent, effort and cost you put in will depend on how much it matters, or what it could cost, if you lost it. It used to matter a great deal more when I was not retired. Now, it's more a case of mattering emotionally than monetarily, but I'm in the habit.

[blokeinkent]

I'll be the first to ashamedly admit I don't, and a 30 year career in IT along with a couple of nasty failures mean I really should know better. I did for a while back in the early 2000's but then thing got into the high GB's and I slipped ignorantly into the 'I'll get around to it soon' trap

Perhaps some of you can share a bit of knowledge on some reliable online solutions other than the obvious OneDrive/Google route?

[nar53]

I backup my Photo's & Music to an external 4tb raid & I backup local files such as Docs to the cloud.

[spacein_vader]

I do. Pc to server, server to cloud and weekly (ish) removable hdd.

My challenge going forward is getting the wife and kids into similar habits. They've got cloud backup for photos docs and videos but that's only a single layer.

[LeetyMcLeet]

Religiously.