How do you backup?


What is your main preference when backing up?  

55 members have voted

  1. 1. Where do you backup?

  2. 2. What media?

  3. 3. What exactly do you back up?

    • Non-replacable
    • Everything (image a entire drive/drives)
    • Important but replacable


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Hello,

While something in a VM gets installed, I thought about this after reading a front page news article about how a guy went to save his Xbox...

How do you back up?

Now the poll is problably going to get redone a couple of times because I dont think Ive put all the options (they are also limited) but one thing I will not do is allow multiple choice. Now, I imagine most do several backups, one on-site and another off-site, but lets keep it to the perfered and/or one you do the most.

Please comment if there is some option that you would add :)

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Need an option for both off and on-site, I'm sure I'm not the only one who does both.

 

That said, my usual backup routine includes mainly the "non-replacable" stuff.. everything that I already have on disc or whatever elsewhere I don't bother.  Does not include a "master image" of the entire file system after a full install, just so I don't have to go through the motions of installing a bajillion things over again if disaster hits, always do one of those for a new system before anything else.  Everything critical/personal gets backed up here, and business related stuff is also kicked off-site to another server I have elsewhere. 

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Hello,

Need an option for both off and on-site, I'm sure I'm not the only one who does both.

I mentioned this:

Now, I imagine most do several backups, one on-site and another off-site, but lets keep it to the perfered and/or one you do the most.

:)
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Dropbox 100GB plan, on local main desktop -  all important files kept here. Has revision restore and unlimited undelete (early adopter feature). Also running a off-site server which syncs to the same Dropbox account. Full sync.

 

Other data not in dropbox like large media files is on a Synology NAS RAID mirror - Local main desktop setup with SyncBackFree - http://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/freeware-hub.html which does a "Mirror", (one way sync) to the same remote off-site server which is running https://filezilla-project.org/download.php?type=server and jobs setup to Mirror the Synology NAS over FTP to the off-site server.

 

Plus of course external drive which is mirrored once a month.

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On-site, backup to Synology DS213 NAS. I backup everything (my entire drive), but I only care about documents/pictures/videos. I could care less about the other files. 

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I switched around a lot between solutions but ive settled on System Center DPM because Acronis Arcserve and the rest are painfully slow to update their solutions.

Servers get a full backup once a week to a RAID 6 array (3 week retention)

Clients don't get a full backup as that's mosty wasted space when you start with a pre-made image with software already installed. I just backup the desktop & documents from them to the same RAID6 array.

Important stuff (media, application installers, original images and a copy of the custom images) is stored on another RAID6 array

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For me personally, I tend to go a little overboard, but then again I don?t think you can ever have too many backups.

Inside my computer I have 6 hard drives. 1 of which is used for backup. Every night all of my important things get backed up to that hard drive. At the same time I also have a carbonite subscription which I have about 20GB worth of information that gets backed up there.

Then I also bought 2 regular 3.5 3TB hard drives, to backup every drive on my system. I use it in conjunction with a Sata dock. 1 of the 3TB drives stays in my office, while the other drive gets put in a safety deposit box at the bank. Both drives get swapped monthly and both drives are never at my house at the same time.

The Sata dock via esata gives you native Sata speeds, thus making for a much faster backup.

The software I use is syncback SE, it?s configured never to delete from the backup and to update files which are new or that have changed. Thus the very first backup takes the longest, after that, not so much.

 

As far as my quickbooks company files I have versioning setup which saves 7 versions on a usb drive plugged into my Quickbooks laptop (Accessed from all computers via RDP) and 2 computers on my network. Which in turn gets grabbed by carbonite and my offsite backup.

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Neurotically. After many disasters I've implemented a very disciplined backup rutine.

 

A normal time machine HD backup.

 

A biweekly redundant backup of my photo and video work in three different external HDs.

 

A yearly DVD backup.

 

Each of the external HDs are in different places (My backpack, my desk and in another house in case of disaster).

 

P.S. I also have a document backup both on the time machine HD and in a 80gb Dropbox account (And my tablet and phone).

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Stuff I don't really care about but want a backup: local backup only to external HDD

Stuff I can't afford to lose: local backup to external HDD and backup to the cloud.

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I backup on-site and off-site; also i use different media (HDD, cloud) and i backup everything (full backup, system image) and irreplaceable files (incremental, file history) with different schedule settings (GFS), this mostly because of lack of backups in the past resulted in several GB of very important and irreplaceable data to be lost; never again i said.

 

Please change the poll so the options can be more accurate of the different configurations people use.

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I have a 1 TB external hard drive with an encrypted backup of my home folder.  Deja-dup is scheduled to run a differential backup once a week and it keeps old versions of files for up to 6 months.  I need to a 2nd hard drive that I duplicate the first one to just in case the primary external dies.  When I moved from Washington to Kentucky I drove, and my Ford Explorer was absolutely packed to the brim.  I stuffed my one, and only, external hard drive under the seat for 4 days right next to two pretty strong magnetic CB radio antenna mounts, and when I got home the hard drive had been nuked.  I was able to re-partition and reformat it, but none of my data recovery attempts were successful.  I got a new hard drive just to be safe, but I had a lot of irreplaceable stuff on that old hard drive that wouldn't fit on my computer hard drive, and a ton of stuff that is replaceable but it's a pain to do, namely ISO images of all my DVDs, and scans of a lot of my professional development paperwork (awards, promotions, etc.); which I still haven't gotten around to re-doing.  Needless to say, I'm living proof that it's a good idea to have a backup of your backup, :p

 

After that incident, I'm a little less skittish about synchronizing some of my folders with the Ubuntu One cloud service.

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On-site and off-site. I manually back-up my data from my laptop to my NAS (RAID1) using SyncBack Free. (Mainly because it's versatile and offers great CRC checking). And my NAS automatically backs up to an external NTFS disk and an online 100GB (rsync) storage using the task manager from Synology. I choose NTFS, so in case my NAS goes bananas, I can still access my data using any OS I want. Mount as read-only under Linux / OSX and just plug it in on my Windows machine. (Because if my NAS goes bananas, I go bananas, so I need an easy to use solution, just in case).

 

/Edit: the automatic back-up runs once a week, my data doesn't change much, so that's fine for now.

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Time Machine in OSX, to a local HDD. Really need to look into a Time Capsule though - just not sure I can stomach the exorbitant cost. 

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Hello,

Off-site to external hard drive using copy-paste method.

Off-site means that you cannot physically touch the backup without traveling and/or you move it shortly (the same day ideal) afterwards to another location where you cannot physically touch the backup without traveling.
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