Computer Back-up
 

Quick question - how is everyone here backing up the material on their computers?

My laptop just recovered from the blue screen of death. Terrified that it would not restart. No restart means all the stuff on the hard drive is unavailable.

I'd be very interested to learn the options you've all selected to avoid this potential disaster.

I have a backup server that polls a number of my users' machines. As external drives become cheaper and operating systems now come with built-in backup software, we don't have near as many machines using my backup services. The Win 7 backup routine works fine. My Apple users, of course, run Time Machine. External drives come with their own back-up software so you have a number of options.

I use an 2 Tb external HDD that automatically backs up all of the computers in my house each week.

You want continuous and off site. I use Carbonite. You can access your backed up files remotely with a droid or app.

I do a similar backup, very simple.

My /home partition lives on a RAID-1 array. Once in a blue moon, I'll back up /etc (most system settings), dump a list of installed packages, and keep 'em in my home directory. Assuming I have replacement parts, I've had a machine let the magic smoke out and I was back up and running with all data intact in just under 30 minutes.

Nothing I have is worth an off site backup, with a few exceptions and those get stored in a few places...

How much data are you keeping offsite? It seems like it would be an issue to send a lot of files offsite.

Our Primary server is RAID backs itself up every night to another drive. My plan is to have some other files in an offsite place as well. But I don't want to send 50GB each day.

Same thing I do.

I don't bother with backing up the OS & applications. I keep all my personal files organized under a single folder (my laptop) or second drive (workstation). It will have folders for mainly static stuff (music/pictures/etc...) and folders for dynamic stuff (docs/development code). Every week or so I plug in a USB drive and copy the dynamic folders over. The static stuff (much larger) gets copied only when it was modified locally. Easy to mange and OS neutral - I do this across PC/Linux/Mac.

All of this means nothing if all the backup devices are lost in a home fire or theft. Cloud backup will become the norm in just a few more years. For your super critical files it makes sense today.

I let the mac to a daily backup to "Time machine" on an external drive. Once every couple of months, I rotate that external drive with another sitting in a safe deposit box at the bank.
Backups at home do you no good when the place burns to the ground or gets broken into... and I'm not comfortable with backing up to the cloud, sooner or later someone will break into whatever storage you are using and it's like public domain out there ;-)

No, a blue scree of death won't cause you to loose the stuff on your hard drive. At least, not stuff like documents, photos, music. You might lose installed programs if you don't have a way to install then again like cd our downloaded file. A blue screen generally means that windows is having a problem, not your hard drive.

Data security in the Cloud is a BIG DEAL. Vendors know this and spend lots of money making sure they get it right. I recently saw a quote stating that if enterprise is not spending at least $100K/yr on data security then their data would be more secure with a Cloud based solution.

Not really mainstream yet but fears of data compromise are overstated. YMMV.

^^ This

I looked into various network attached storage sloutions to backup routinely. I never found something that I wanted to risk getting frustrated with. I'm putting more stuff on Google Docs, but mostly for access from other locations. I have an external drive but quit the manual stuff after if filled up with all the interval backup stuff I never used. I wiped it and started over and just add picture backups.
I would like to know more specifics on what is recommended for NAS with a RAID array that sits below the $250 price point. There were some before that nearly met my frustration free desires but reviews were mixed. I would also like to go with a Solid State drive for op system and other programs, but never got the feeling that the software to set it up was simplified. I built this PC (i5 W7) and I don't want to do it again until it needs it!

For my Mac, I use a 3TB external drive and Time Machine.

However, beware - I once had a disk fail, then had trouble restoring to the new drive using Time Machine. Like, serious trouble. So, every couple of months, I also do a complete disk clone with Carbon Copy Cloner, and I keep that external HDD offsite.

both the Mac and Win 7 have auto backup facilities built in - you just attach a big ext. HDD and let 'er rip

there is another thread on this in OT and I think I posted a link to the Win 7 how to

I have Windows Home Server running on an old Dell with 2GB of RAM and 5x2TB hard drives for 10TB of storage. Every PC in the house gets a full disk image and is incrementally backed up every day. Very easy to setup, use and restore! All of our data (music, videos and photos are stored on the server. Every file is stored on 2 separate hard drives in case 1 hard drive dies.

the problem is that a house fire etc. will destroy it all - that is why people use off-site backups

however, even off-site backups are no good if the Cylons attack

I just drag and drop user info only on an external drive i.e.. documents, audio, pictures, movies, etc.

or you don't pay your bill.

I also back up photos and videos to a portable hard drive and I keep that in the safe with the spoons. It would be better to take it offsite, but I always forget to do that....

Dumb question - how much heat does it take to destroy a portable hard drive? I'm guessing a spoon has a higher tolerance. While investigating safes (and Art knows way more than I) the fire ratings in minutes are based on when paper combusts minus 50 or so degrees F...or so I am told.

Best (for cloud service skeptics) would be to either leave a backup drive with family and/or work site. But that is a pain...

whatever is in my HD. $60/year I live in brushfire country, so offsite backup is a must.

I ghost an image file onto a Western Digital 2Tb external disk. I don't care about losing a file or two. I just can't face building a new laptop up with all my applications and preferences.

They start to fail at 120 deg F under operating conditions. The bearing caps melt after that and spill lubricant all over the platters. 350 deg and the plastic parts start to melt. But all of that is academic really, a place like On-Track can pull the metal platters and recover the data. The platters are aluminum and melt around 640 deg iirc.

I've seen a few drives survive fires, and the platters were mostly always recoverable in a clean room with the correct tools, but how much do you want to pay? I've seen recovery bills as high as 15k on some of the really bad ones.

At home I use a Netgear NAS with mirrored drives which I also backup to an offsite USB external disc. I use CrashPlan for online cloud backup but it takes FOREVER to get that going. I have over 1TB of stuff I consider critical.

At work we have an elaborate system with LTO tape auto-changers and RAID discs that snapshot changes every 2 hours. As a software business, we cannot afford data loss or system downtime.