Posted: 12/21/2016 3:43:17 PM EDT
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what are you currently using?
I typically just plug a portable drive in once a month or so and do a copy and paste of documents and pictures. Its always worked so i haven't looked for a fix until that drive that i have been using for 8 years failed to come on today. Currently looking at the WD My cloud as from what i can tell it is on your home network, and can backup all electronics in the house. My fear with this method is that it is still vulnerable to hackers (reading the ransomware threads) and power surges. Fire is another, but i keep the drive in the safe. Anyone using an online backup program? Price and experience? |
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As a cloud services provider with a data-center, I use vmWare Store Grid (which is the same back up software a bunch of cloud services offer).
It probably goes by whatever re-branded name a company wants to call it, but it's pretty much all the same. Watch out for some companies that offer cheap backup service, but charge you a big fee to recover certain file types like images and other media files. The reason some companies have such catches is because many furnish the same application and they're outselling each other for pennies / GB. The only way they can make money is by offering a "premium service" like phone support to do a system restore, etc. ETA: For my business, the simple online backup stuff is just a loss leader for folks with really basic IT needs. We have enterprise services for big data (WARP Mech, EMC, Tivoli etc), but it's nice to have some freebies and cheap stuff that helps folks get by until they need something custom). Anyhow, just make sure you know if there are any considerable expenses to getting your stuff back and find out what kind of support is offered. |
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Using linux platforms here. Using Borg backup to an offsite building every 8 hours via dedicated wireless link that then syncs to a site on the opposite side of the US every 24 hours
Borg backup does file/block level deduplication and compression and encryption. Has a myriad of features I've wanted in a backup platform forever. . |
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Synology 4 bay 4 TB NAS on raid 5 , and weekly rotate 2 USB drives to back up NAS and take offsite , also back up NAS to Amazon S3 Monthly.Â
Cost was about 600$ and S3 is free to push data to them , only cost me if I need to pull it down and I never have needed to but if I did it would be about 160$ . |
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Pictures, family videos, and miscellaneous files in OneDrive - backed up weekly on external HDD. Financial, legal,medical, and work files backed up between two IronKeys. This is what I do. I just save stuff on my OneDrive. If the computer ever crashes / hard drive failure, oh well. New drive, reinstall Windows and everything comes back automatically. |
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From 15+ years in small business, here is what I think.
No matter what you do, keep doing that copy to the external hard drive, and make sure you unplug the external hard drive when the copy is finished. Make sure you know where important shit like your Outlook .pst files are stored. Not everything is in "My Documents." Keep a hawk eye on your where your staff is saving stuff. There is about a 99.99999% they're not saving everything important to the places they're supposed to be saving it. The world's best back-up system doesn't do shit if your staff is saving important information to places it doesn't reach. Back-up is fine and dandy. What really counts is restoring files from a back-up. Unless you're periodically testing your ability to restore files from your back-up system, you're not really accomplishing much. I like copies much better than back-ups. In short, what you use is much less important than how you use it. |
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Personally, I just use time machine and an external hard drive (that's not generally plugged in).
Cloud backup is okay, but make sure you have the internet pipe to deal with the data. Â If you just copy your shit to another drive, make damn sure it's only plugged in while you backup... And frankly, that's a poor method. |
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Step 1: Plug external drive into my macbook pro Step 2: Click back up now Step 3: Eject external drive done I still do that, local backups are important to get back into business quickly after a catastrophic failure. But a fire, theft, or even a large enough lightning strike can take both the original and the local backup out. So I also use CrashPlan. It's $60/year for peace of mind. You just set it and forget it. It also does versioning which means you can go back to a certain date to get data even if you modified it or deleted it. |
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what are you currently using? I typically just plug a portable drive in once a month or so and do a copy and paste of documents and pictures. Its always worked so i haven't looked for a fix until that drive that i have been using for 8 years failed to come on today. Currently looking at the WD My cloud as from what i can tell it is on your home network, and can backup all electronics in the house. My fear with this method is that it is still vulnerable to hackers (reading the ransomware threads) and power surges. Fire is another, but i keep the drive in the safe. Anyone using an online backup program? Price and experience? Personally, I would keep doing what you are doing, but perhaps enter a second drive for long term backups in between. |
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I use a WD PR2100 NAS for my main data storage, Plex, and FTP. It has 2X8TB drives in Raid 1 w/o hardware encryption enabled.
The NAS gets backed up to an 8TB external drive that is attached to a machine that isn't turned on much frequently. The 8TB drive gets backed up to other drives (1 drive with movies/music and 2 drives with financial info). The financial drives are swapped out every so often in my safe deposit box. The other drive with music/movies is kept and work and I take it home and update it when I need to. I also use Dropbox for the really, really important stuff, however, there is a catch with that as I accidentally deleted the Dropbox folder contents once and it synced all deletes up to Dropbox. Happily I had another machine that was turned off at the time that I recovered them all from without having to get Dropbox involved but it was an Oh Shit!!!! moment for sure 
I wrote my own backup software that I use to sync the files up as I couldn't find anything that I liked back when I was looking a few years ago. |
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How many computers do you need to backup? What kind of computers? How many gigs of data? What is it worth to you? All are important questions to help scope a proper answer. That's so cute 
I started to rethink my backups when I realized I had 5TB+ of data that I needed to back up. Using Plex to host my movies/tv/music really opened my eyes to how much data we consume nowadays. It doesn't take long to use 1TB when backup up DVD's and converting them to MP4's. |
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That's so cute
I started to rethink my backups when I realized I had 5TB+ of data that I needed to back up. Using Plex to host my movies/tv/music really opened my eyes to how much data we consume nowadays. It doesn't take long to use 1TB when backup up DVD's and converting them to MP4's. But do you need those movies backed up? Can't you just download them again? |
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what are you currently using? I typically just plug a portable drive in once a month or so and do a copy and paste of documents and pictures. Its always worked so i haven't looked for a fix until that drive that i have been using for 8 years failed to come on today. Currently looking at the WD My cloud as from what i can tell it is on your home network, and can backup all electronics in the house. My fear with this method is that it is still vulnerable to hackers (reading the ransomware threads) and power surges. Fire is another, but i keep the drive in the safe. Anyone using an online backup program? Price and experience? |
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Important personal and family docs are backed up to iDrive and copied to Google Docs. Â My pictures are on Google Photos and Dropbox. Â Lots of crap on MS One Drive as well, I kind of use it as a dump bucket.
Everything on my PC also gets copied automatically to a local USB drive using Win10's File History. |
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Crashplan. It's as close to "Set it and forget it" as you can get. I use it for personal files and support ~500 user deployment. It's never let us down. I've used crashplan for years (just for our household) and have been very happy. I back up important stuff (important records, files, pictures, home movies, etc.--stuff that I really could not replace) both to a local drive and to the cloud through crashplan. For the media server, I use mirrored drives in the server and a physical backup drive every few months that gets stored in my desk drawer at work |
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I use shell scripts, probably not the best solution for everyone though. I recommend SyncBack Free for those who don't want to create their own scripts.
Also, I don't trust third-party companies with my data, so I created/host my own "cloud." Best practice is to utilize the three-two-one rule: At least three copies,
In two different media formats, With one of those copies off-site. Example: Copy one is your computer, copy two is a portable hard drive kept in your safe, copy three is an offsite set of DVDs or "cloud" service. ENCRYPT EVERYTHING |