Do you have a backup strategy?
I’d like to take a moment to talk about a topic that’s very dear to my heart: What’s your backup strategy?
A hard drive can fail at any moment, and it’s often hard or even impossible to rescue all the data on it. While most people don’t have data on their hard drive that is as valuable as mine, in particular the original PSD comic files, there is still a lot of data on most hard drives that is very hard or time-consuming to recreate.
Therefore, you should have always have a relatively recent backup of all your data! Here is a summary of my current backup strategy:
- All my personal files are within a single folder on the hard drive. This makes it easy to create a complete backup of them.
- I have a complete backup of this folder on my second PC at my parents’ house.
- Every second weekend I copy all changes to the second PC. So even if a fire should destroy my flat, I will still have a recent backup of all my data.
This simple strategy could certainly be improved. But it’s already significantly better than having all your data in just one physical location.
If you want to inform yourself about the topic, you can find a lot of articles about reasonable backup strategies on Google. If you want to use a cloud service to backup your personal data, you should consider encrypting the files first before uploading them so that nobody else can look at them.
Look into Crashplan. There is a paid unlimited offsite option, but there is also a free way to use it.
All your data is encrypted. Back up your data to an external disk, and then attach it to your parents computer, also running Crashplan. Now your PC will just send updates from there on out. It constantly updated as long as both systems are online.
For myself, a Mac user, we use TimeMachine to keep local copies, but have Crashplan set up so,data gets copied to their servers.
Again, all data is encrypted with a super long key. In an emergency I can pay essentially the price of a new disk drive, and they ship it to me with all my data on it.
Another nice advantage is that you can login to your Crashplan account on the web and pull down copies of files one, or a few at a time. All your files are in your own kind of Dropbox. I know they have mobile clients for viewing your files as well.
@ AJ:
If you are using Windows 7 or later all you need is an external HD as MS included Robocopy which has many options for mirroring drives. It doesn’t do MBR but, it will copy permissions & encrypted files. Pretty simple to use too and it also does block level copying so changing 2mb on that 2GB file isn’t going to take forever to update.
Veeam is a great backup application. They’re paid product is one of the best in the industry at an excellent price. They also have an endpoint backup solution for free.
Mine is kind of complicated, but here it is.
First, I back up almost everything on the various machines. Otherwise, if a primary hard drive fails, it is a LOT of work to reinstall Windows and find the installation media for all applications. In my case, this is a few days work to get back to full operation. Much better to just do a bare metal restore.
I use Retrospect for Windows backing up to hard drives (there is a Mac version also). The basic operation for Retrospect is to compare the contents of the hard drive backup set to the current contents of the machine and to copy over any files on the machine that are not on the backup set. It can restore to a machine with no operating system and can restore a machine, directory, or file to its state as of any given backup so also provides file version rollback. Since a backup is only copying files that are not already on the backup set, they are pretty fase.
I back up to 5 backup sets. 3 live in my house. Each gets used twice a week for backup and I rotate through the set weekly so each gets used every 3 weeks. 3 times a year I wipe one of the sets and take a full backup, so each set is wiped once a year.
The other two sets rotate through a friend’s house. The set that is here is backed up to once a week. I exchange the two sets on average once a month and wipe and full backup each set every two years.
Part of the rational for this is understanding that you place a disk at risk whenever you connect it. A power fluctuation with a disk mounte can corrupt a disk and disks usually fail when in use. So if a backup set fails, I have backups for the failed backup.
I use bare drives to backup to, and use one of these
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/thermaltake-dual-bay-docking-station-for-most-internal-sata-hard-drives/9419596.p?id=1218102199901
or these
http://www.amazon.com/Thermaltake-Backplane-Removable-3-5-Inches-RC2300101A/dp/B004G8QERU/ref=sr_1_5?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1448343495&sr=1-5&keywords=internal+hard+drive+cage
to mount the drives.
It works very well. I back up 4 machines and over the years have had to do bare metal restores on two. No problems.
Have a look at BittorentSync
https://www.getsync.com/
Its capable of keeping two folders on separate computers in sync in almost real time.
It uses the peer-to-peer protocol bit-torrent and works a lot like Google drive or drop-box, but without the third party in the middle charging you for storage.
The free version works just fine for simple backup purposes.
one of my favorite features is its archive function, where it will keep a copy on the remote computer of any changes made on yours.. so if you accidentally damage or destroy one of your files its easy to find an earlier version and restore it.
Use git?
I know it isn’t actually made for art, but it’s more than possible to submit pictures and shit to git, and then you can have an overview of the history as well. in case you want to look at old versions of comics you later brushed up or look at your own uploading habits.
Currently I perform incremental backups with HardlinkBackup at my home and my workplace. Since a full backup takes on the order of half an hour, during which some programs must not access files (the free version can’t backup locked files) I end up doing them at best once per week, so I use Spideroak for regular online backups of most of my data.
Since all software-modifiable data storage can be corrupted by e.g. a virus, and in case I delete an important file and notice it only so long later that I have already thrown away incremental backups of that time, I used to make a full copy to DVDs using WinRAR for convenient splitting across disks and password protection once or twice a year. Since my data now is on the order of 50GB and Blueray never became a really viable option, I gave up on that though, as burning 10 disks in a row is quite a show-stopper.
While it was viable, WinRAR provided the advantaege of being the only compression tool I’m aware of that allows password protection, splitting large files across multiple partial archives, creating redundant disks to restore data in case of damage to one of the disks, and (which is especially a difference to a tar|gzip|split chain) quickly listing and accessing the files stored on a single disk.
Phillip Mackintosh wrote:
This feature may just make bittorrent sync the only sync software that is actually a viable backup strategy. Most sync software has the weakness that it propagates deletions without an easy way to access prior versions of the deleted file. I’ve read an article once about some blogger who lost all his family photos because his only backup was iCloud sync. Then someone hacked his account and the data was remotely deleted from all his devices.
Haiiro wrote:
I definitely recommend using distributed version control system like git or bazaar for backup. But then, most of important stuff I need to backup are actually programs, so …
Crashplan. $150/yr gets you strongly encrypted unlimited offsite backup for up to ten machines as well as mobile secure access to your files. Best investment I have ever made.
@ Klaus:
Please keep in mind that sync is not backup. If you get a ransomware infection, and all your files get encrypted, those changes will be synced to the other side, and you’ve lost all your data. The same goes for any other destructive process, by corruption or human error. Any remote backup strategy should be full copies, incremental, or differential, not a simple sync.
You should also keep offline copies of any vitally important data. I’m guilty of not keeping up with these myself.
All my important data is 3 to 4 times redundant.
I keep the data on my workstation @ home, my laptop which I always carry with me, in an encrypted file container on dropbox and on my server. The data is copied via the dropbox or Samba.
The workstation and server also have an RAID so if one drive dies the system keeps running.
@ qman:
I suppose I should actually share my methods, too.
I keep my large data on a ZFS volume on a server, which takes hourly/daily/weekly/monthly snapshots, and sends them to a backup server, so I have two machines with snapshots going back at least a year. For my individual machines, I run BackupPC on another server. I then take archives of the BackupPC server to USB for my offline backups, but I’m bad at keeping up with those, and I don’t have an offline strategy for the ZFS volume because of its size (~30TB).
I’m not yet adequately protected against fire and natural disaster, my plan for that is to get the ZFS backup server moved to a remote location. Doing that cost-effecitvely is difficult, though.
How about a simple hard drive mirror (RAID 1: German Wikipedia)?
Of course this would require you to use two hard drives and set up your PC to save your data on both disks in parallel. I’m not sure, but this should not be too difficult. However, I know that graphic data can become quite big and use a lot of disk space. So, if you need to buy hard drives frequently, this might not be the ideal solution for you.
If you just want to keep data safe, such as your original PSDs, and do not need to use them, I’d suggest copying them onto DVDs.
As of right now, I have about 10tb of storage all over the place, and having changed out each of my 5 machines after about 2 years of using it, all my data is chaotically scattered in multiple duplicates. Hopefully I will get a home server with a raid system for the data I use frequently across devices, and bespoke backups for each machine
I have many hard drives in my computer: 3+ configured in a RAID 5 for mass storage and 2 small ones in a RAID 0 for OS and related things. If any single drive fails, no data is lost. If that happens, I stop using my computer and switch to my laptop until I get a replacement drive and reestablish the RAID. This prevents multiple drive failures in succession from causing any data loss.
Additionally, I keep redundant copies of very important files on both of my personal computers (at my mom’s and dad’s houses), on a flash drive, on my laptop, and on Google Drive.
I’ve also been meaning to look more into BackBlaze, which offers unlimited offsite backup for one machine for $5/month, which you can access from anywhere with an internet connection. I’m not sure if it’s encrypted, but I think it updates in realtime. Like I said, I need to do more research on it before deciding to use it.
All in all, I have 5 or 6 levels of redundancy and I feel my files are safe.
I have a 128GB USB drive on my keychain. Every weekend I make compressed, encrypted backups of most of my files with 7-zip, and copy them onto my USB drive. I’ve also started copying some of them to my Google Drive, but my Internet connection is slow.
But I record way too many TV shows on my computer for that to back up the entire system. So I just ordered a 5TB external hard drive.
I have a large volume of free online storage with numerous different providers that I’ve accumulated over the years, it’s a little messy but anything not entirely personal that I’d like to keep, I upload to one of these providers and later download onto a mix of devices both old and current. The current devices allow ease of access should I lose the files, while the old devices which don’t get much use act as a sort of time capsule. For files I want to guard more securely, a mix of a private VPS, some cryptography, and a complicated sneaker net are the way to go. Overall, while retrieving files is a bit ridiculous due to high levels of redundancy mixed with uncertainty (“Where did I put that file again…?”) I’m almost guaranteed that the files will outlive my need for them. Of course, this method only works for files that I don’t change regularly. For regular changes, a BTSync setup which all my main devices are connected to and which is mainly shouldered by a VPS and my phone handles everything.
Google drive is my go too to be honest. I have seen a lot of people recommend Crash plan it is perhaps the best option if you need or want the encryption. I use Google drive because it is great and all you have to do is save stuff to a file and it will sync. Also if you are working on projects creating them in gdrive will enable you to open them on any computer with the appropriate program ( I do a lot of programming so this works well for me to share projects across computers back up is of course git). The manual method I dont think is all the good tbh.
I have a Windows Server Essentials server which backs up everything every night. I have an external USB drive that lives outside the house, and I have another drive left with family.
If I may add something to this conversation:
If your hard drive fails for anything other than mechanical reasons, you can often quickly get it working again by using a very fine piece of software called SpinRite. SpinRite can rescue data from bad or damaged sectors and repair the drive by swapping in good spare sectors. Beyond that, people who run SpinRite as a regular maintenance tool (instead of emergency recovery) report that it keeps their drives from failing, so they never have to do emergency recovery (there are technical reasons for this). I cannot recommend SpinRite highly enough. It can be purchased from Gibbson Research at grc.com
Full backups can be huge, so I agree with those who have mentioned using some sort of versioning software for intelligent backups to keep down the bloat. (Avoid using automatically file synchronization if you want to avoid ransomware risks.)
RAID and cloud storage are good components to a larger backup plan, but they are not complete solutions. As others have mentioned, they don’t avoid the risk of ransomware. RAID also suffers from being onsite. It is best for backups to be offsite to reduce the risk of loss due to physical disaster (fire, flood, fallout, etc).
Have a look at Synology network attached storage. It is friendly to use (webadmin gui, linux based system) and receives regular security and feature updates free of charge.
Set up two of these boxes in two different places with sync enabled and you’re set to go.
https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/5.2