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.
I’m lazy, so I’m using Backblaze as my backup. Continuous cloud storage, plus it does offer encryption. I don’t use it, because I’m lazy, but it’s there.
Preach.
While I’ve never lost a hard drive (though I did once lose a CPU, which taught me to build my computers much more carefully in ways where things won’t *catch on fire*), I still do backups regularly. I don’t have enough spare local space to back up everything on both my computers, but a $14 a month payment to CrashPlan helps out with that.
I use Windows File History to continuously backup all the files on my laptop to an external drive on my main desktop, where I have CrashPlan set up ($5/month) continuously backing up all my files (both from my laptop and desktop) to the cloud.
Gotta follow the 3-2-1 backup plan:
1. at least 3 copies,
2. on at least 2 different media
3. with 1 of those copies off-site
> Every second weekend I copy all changes to the second PC.
It sounds like right now you’ve only got one backup, which could be as old as two weeks. Better than nothing, but it would suck to lose two weeks of work because of something as common as a hard drive crash.
If your internet plan allows it, I recommend you switch to a more continuous solution like CrashPlan, which offers free, over-the-internet backups to other computers you own. They only charge for cloud backup.
At the very least, you should get another hard drive to locally backup your files to so only a major disaster like a fire or burglary could set you back those two weeks.
I have a Syncthing node at each of:
* My personal computer
* My phone (excluding my video library)
* My webhost
* My home server
Rating for setup: Oh. God. Why is this such a pain?!
Rating for maintenance: Sometimes I forget that it exists.
@ Bryan Elliott:
Added bonuses:
* I have an easy way to send files to my phone, or to modify things on my webhost: Just put files where they belong
* Versioning. I’ve got it limited to 10 versions, though
* Encryption: over the wire, nothing is cleartext
* Control: I say “a syncthing node”, but each “node” has several shares. The Videos share is kept off my phone due to its size, but is fine everywhere else, for example. Shares can be stored clear or encrypted, depending on if you just want backup space on the node, or if you want the data usable from the node.
* Privacy: Only my nodes see my content; there is no third-party keeping my stuff. Most of the webhost shares are encrypted on-disk at the node, and unreadable by any noosy admins.
You should have the backup be on different physical media too.
Easily done if you use a flash drive to transport the files from one computer to the next.
Congrats on having a good strategy.
I am probably like many others and woke up to the problem only because I got hit by disaster myself.
Now I because I have a fast and unlimited internet connection I have everything encrypted and backed up on CrashPlan’s servers. I’ve found it easy ( I usually forget it’s there) and affordable (cheaper than a another computer or external hard drives), plus it’s already saved my bacon once. That is my backup solution for all of my data. For more mission critical data that I might need faster in case of disaster would hit me (and for everyday convenience and ease of sharing) I have a lot of stuff synced with my laptop through Dropbox and Mega.
There. Now why did I share all that?
i have 23 TB of space spread between 8 HDD 1 SSD 2 External USB and 2 External/mobile Sata.
I keep all files separated in folders (outside of the basic program layout) I use both goggle drive and One drive for auto backups, and a auto backup script tied into my MEGA. all personal and irreplaceable are backed-up and/or replaced as needed once every 12 hours. (att limits us at 151 gb without charging us extra and i burn through 60gb of that bandwidth in just backups) i use 1 of the usb and 1 of the externals for personal backup. i also keep a ubuntu live usb around in case my windows ever corrupts and i need to retrieve data. my Bios allows for hot-swapping sata as well so its good for putting in extra drives to grab large amounts of data fast. I also keep 10TB of dvds ready for storage, just in case. all my music, Which i cant rip from the cd or cassette i own, are kept on google music as a backup, and all the old vhs and betamax i have are stored on dvds as not to lose them as the tapes degrade. My policy is you can NEVER have enough storage, and enough ways to store. redundancy is key to the digital age, end of story.
I sort of have a backup plan, in that every once in a while I manually save some of my files into Google Drive. I don’t have many essential files yet, though, so I don’t really need to back them up that often? I also do most of my schoolwork in Drive, so it’s in The Cloud™
Most of the code that is important to me is on github. My art is programming.
I encrypt and zip all my important files, then put it on a p2p sharing network with a filename filled of explicit sex slang. It’ll still be there in a thousand years.
My backup strategy for my Web work, programming work, and the very rare art work is as so.
1)
I have a office 365 subscription.
That gives me a TB of space on One Drive.
All my work is on OneDrive.
2)
I occasionally take an external hard drive and upload stuff to it.
I have a stack of desktop and laptop old hard drives and a hard drive mount (which cost me $30), which makes this easy as putting it in like a SNES cartrige.
3)
My work is also synchronized between my Laptop and Desktop
@ Trevor:
Yea I use backblaze as well, it works awesomely. It already saved me once when my laptop fell overboard… long story XD
So I agree wholeheartedly with backing up your computer, and preferably keeping a copy offsite (cloud, your place of work, wherever).
But this really irked me:
Many people will have things like family pics on their computer, which could be impossible to recreate. They may not have monetary value, but they are still incredibly valuable to those people. Saying that those are not as valuable is incredibly patronising. And it’s possible that some of your readers may work from their home computer, as per some of the earlier comments in fact. I certainly would call recreating several thousand lines of code time consuming (and the code valuable).
@ Am:
OK for the pics, but a developer who stores “several thousands lines of code” on his own computer without any kind of source control (which acts as a backup, among other things) should be taken out and shot. Seriously.
I’ve been burned enough times but non-existent or insufficient backup to know better now. I’m a techie and openly admit I’ve gone a bit over board.
I have a file server with multiple disks in a btrfs RAID 1 array. I use Crashplan to backup this server to the cloud. I also use Crashplan to backup my desktops/laptops to both the file server and the cloud.
Also, since I like to move between a few different computers I have a good chunk of my “current” data in Google Drive or Dropbox. I know this isn’t true backup but both allow you to restore deleted and previous version.
Critical Files: I have these backed up in at least two other locations other than my hard drive. If something happens to my hard drive, my most important files and my KeePass stuff is backed up. I also make sure I sync the KeePass stuff once a month so I don’t lose new stuff / credentials which have changed.
Music: Two locations. If something happens, most of my music is from Bandcamp. I can get it again from there. But I do have a local backup.
Games: Most of my games are through third-parties that provide me downloads again. No problems there.
Niche Stuff: Backed up on two external hard drives.
Everything else: I don’t care about it, so if I lose it, no big deal. It’s only stored locally since I had to reference it at one point.
Thanks for trying to educate your readers!
In *addition* to what you’re already doing, I recommend using Backblaze … it’s very inexpensive,
and the company is “good people”. (Not only do they publish the plans to let people make
their own backup servers, they also publish statistics on hard drive reliability, which helps
every user and also drives the drive vendors to improve reliability.)
On my Mac: Time Machine to one external, *and* daily Carbon Copy Cloner to a second external drive, and weekly Carbon Copy Cloner to a set of third drives that I move offsite, *and* Backblaze.
One important tip for any backup program or service: *TEST IT NOW*.
You need to be sure that you can actually get the data from the backup 🙂
Time Machine and Backblaze (and most (all?) other cloud solutions) have little or no “cold iron” restoration capability … that’s why I also use Carbon Copy. (I.e., you’ve got the backup and a bare / new computer … how do you restore the OS *and all your applications and settings*?)
Oh yeah, BackBlaze lets you get older versions of your files, and you can also choose to
pay extra and get a hard drive with your data sent to you … nice feature!
Stan (yeah, I’ve designed and implemented backup systems in the past for mainframes 🙂 Sieler
For things like Documents, which are small and could change over time, I use the snapshot function of ZFS (on Linux) to keep a local versioned backup. I then use the free version of Crashplan to back it up to another system I have, about an hour’s drive away. Crashplan keeps a versioned backup as well.
For things like photos or home videos, I collect them throughout the year on my NAS (RAID5), with a nightly copy to another system. At the end of the year, I bundle them up, and copy them onto two long-term backup hard disks. One here at my house, and other one, about an hour’s drive away. Normally throughout the year, both long-term backup disks are mounted read-only, providing access to previous year’s photos. Once a week, they run an automated integrity and check, checking the contents of the disks against known-good MD5Sums (for bit-rot detection), replacing the disks as they go bad. I only mount it read-write to add more stuff, at the end of each year. Although the disks contain the same stuff, it’s a manual action by me to mount them read-write, and copy the new stuff on — they’re never sync’d or otherwise touched at the same time.
For anything that is software related – github is the way to go.
For photos I have recently switched to Google Photos and it has been very nice so far.
For anything else, just use Google Drive – edit the files inside the drive folder and the drive will pick up all the changes you make and save a bunch of different versions as well. The price is not too bad as well.
Github for source code, three Time Machine vaults (at different locations) for everything, plus Dropbox and BackBlaze for critical stuff.
Small linux box + daily rsnapshot + 2 external usb 3.0 hard drives + rsync monthly makes my files and data very secure. No need for cloudy stuff.
The 3-2-1 backup plan is the correct way to go: At least 3 copies, on 2 different media and 1 of those copies off-site. If you can manage more than that then better.
My suggestion? Get a Synology NAS. It’s great, it’s hassle-free, it’s upgradable, it’s fun to use.
I use Cloud Station to sync everything from my laptop to the Synology, that protects me from computer failure, robbery, water spilling, and anything that can happen to my laptop.
The NAS has a RAID setup so that protects my data against drive failures.
Both the NAS and the laptop backup to Crashplan so that’s protection against a burglar deciding to take my laptop and my NAS at the same time (Even though they are hardly ever together).
Now, because I’m really paranoid, I also backup to DVD’s every time I have enough new info to fill the 8 Gb. so that’s not really an up-to-date backup but it’s there and kept off site.
And just to top the backup strategy with a cherry, the really really really important files are also on Copy (it’s like dropbox but I like it better).
So in my case is between 4 and 6 copies of a file, 4 media (SSD on the laptop, HDD on the NAS, Cloud and DVD’s) and 3 or 4 locations depending on the location of the laptop at the time.
Also, with Synology File Manager, the web interface, iOs apps or even FTP I have access to my files on the NAS everywhere in the world.
And by getting the Synology you are not only getting the best backup solution, you get an entertainment HUB, work HUB, power horse. I don’t work for them by the way but seriously, check everything you can do with them.
I use Bittorrent Sync (I have pro because I got it cheap, but the free version is more than enough really) to completely sync between my computer, my laptop and my raspberry pi with a usb drive to act as a server. It’s really convenient, I always have all the files I need an automated backups too. Probably should do additional backups with something not usually in the network
I run a weekly backup of my system drive and the folders with the important documents.
I do not have the luxury of a second physical storage space and I will not entrust my data to an online storage service I do not have full control over (so no one drive or MEGA or some such).
The backups I make are copied and stored on two seperate physical disks.
That is as far as i am willing to go for my personal data. Nothing of it is really unrecoverable if I should lose it through a fire or other catastrophe.
If I run a backup strategy for a company it is usally more complex and involves fire proof safes and seperate physical locations.
I’ve had my hard drive fail twice. The first time it literally just popped and that was it completely fried. The second time it showed signs of going bad and almost failed mid transfer of data to a new hard drive, it was toast afterwards. Both times it was a Seagate HD, and both times my power supply on my tower went out. I have a RAID 10 now and a couple TB of memory and back up my info like a squirrel and take bits of info and store some on flash drives and some on my phone, as well as another HD.
Actually, I had a harddisk crash on me recently. It gave fair warning though – for a week before that, the computer had shown a ‘Harddisk failure imminent’ message on start-up, so I had time to update my back-ups.
These consist partly of an external harddisk which I always bring along, if I am away from home overnight, and which is updated regularly, and partly of my laptop which I mostly bring along anytime I leave the house (oh yes, I consider the stationary my main computer – I’m ooold). The latter isn’t updated quite as regularly, but basically I want to have all my files accessible on it.
3 copies, 2 different media, at least 1 off-site. And use a continuous service like Carbonite, Crashplan, et many al – get an online Cloud Backup to go along with your physical backup elsewhere, because that can quickly get a few weeks behind.
The local copy on External HDD or at your parents (or both, that gives you another layer of protection…) is better for fast rebuilding of your system, because while the Cloud Backup has a good copy and you didn’t have to worry about the very slow upload, when you go to do a mass download you find out just how slow your internet connection really is.
I had “two tin cans and a string” 128K DSL pushing the distance limits, and it literally took 3+ weeks to pull it all back at Carbonite’s “Hey, don’t use _all_ the bandwidth!” throttled setting. I’ve got the Slow 3MB plan on Cable now…
This is why some of the Cloud services offer to toss all your files on a portable HDD and mail it to you – As the ancient computing bromide from the 1950’s goes, “You simply cannot beat the bandwidth of a Station Wagon full of 8-track Tapes.” We’ve gotten better, but it’s still valid.
And burn off those original strips to MULTIPLE SETS of CD-R or DVD-R for archival backup too, since you won’t be modifying them anymore but you’ll be destroyed if you manage to lose them. Mail several sets to several relatives, even if one or two discs manage to get corrupted from age or bit rot, odds are most will survive.
I use Linux MD RAID 10 with 4 drives