What backup steps do you do daily/weekly? [closed]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
How do you backup your data?

Backup is super important, but sometimes it's kind of hard to do large backup in long period of time. So what is your backup steps/tricks that can be done daily or weekly so that you can make sure almost all your data get's backed up somewhere.

Answer 1

I just use the built in Time Machine in Mac OS X.

It performs incremental backups hourly, keeps the hourly backups for a day, the daily for a week, the weekly for a month, and the monthly for as long as you have disk space.

Seems to work well as it always has the most recent data.

Answer 2

I use Mozy.

If you have a decent upline, I highly recommend it. I've been using it on a handful of desktops, laptops, and servers for a little over a year. The restore process has been reliable and intuitive the few times I've needed it.

Not really a "backup", but I also tend to keep my active documents in Dropbox, which provides another layer of redundancy.

Answer 3

I like the setup outlined here: Amazon S3, which offers storage in the cloud for literally cents on the gigabyte-month, in conjunction with JungleDisk, a polished, cross-platform backup client. Unfortunately, you can't get an unlimited-use JungleDisk license.

This eliminates the pain of buying expensive hard disks that become obsolete quickly, and then trying to coordinate the backups in a convenient manner. You could also run your own home server, but that's overkill for most people.

Answer 4

For my computers at home I recently bought a Windows Home Server. I added two 1.5 TB drives to the existing two 1 TB disks. So there is plenty of space and I can keep older backups. The backup procedure is surprisingly fast and copies all partitions.

The client software is easy to install and does a good job in automating things and warning you if something went wrong or if you haven't backed up recently. I did a restore for my Windows Media Center and it worked like charm.

Answer 5

Small files (documents/mail) is in servers online and/or written directly to a NAS. I tend not to keep any documents on my local hard drive as they just become inaccessible when using another machine.

My workflow for large sets of data (e.g. photos/videos) is to backup immediately onto an external hard drive (the "I'm an idiot" protection), then copy to local hard drive. Sort/edit on local hard drive, then send over to a 1Tb NAS which is automatically backed up nightly onto another hard drive (the "drive failure" protection). Monthly this is synced to another hard drive held offsite (the "OMG we got robbed" protection).

This is coupled with irregular and chaotic panic-attack-driven fragmented backups to DVDs and other machines within the network, which are so badly organised and never really finished properly, that I end up with backups of bits of data scattered everywhere. I call this the Redundant Array of Rotting CDs (RARC) protection.

Answer 6

I have two Windows systems.

Critical data is stored on a Linux fileserver (via Samba shared drives), which is backed up to tape.

I have one Mac system.

Time Machine backups go over to the same Linux fileserver via AFP (faster than Samba), which is also backed up to tape.

Most of my critical data is backed up in multiple ways to various online locations as well, such as my email all lives in the Google, and source code I work on lives on GitHub.

Answer 7

I use Time Machine on Mac OS X to backup to an external hard drive every few days.

I also backup my photos to rsync.net as required. I like to have my photos backed up remotely as they are the only thing on my machine that is irreplaceable.

Answer 8

Soonr is nice, and adds various extras on top of backup: search, versioning, sharing via public links [can be password protected], ...

Answer 9

I just run a scheduled job in the middle of the night that copies my important folders to another harddrive so that just in case that drive crashes I have the stuff on another drive.

For my web server, which is really small and only has one drive, I set up an automatic script that compresses all my web server stuff and /etc, logs in to the ftp on my main computer and uploads everything to a folder. Sure, there is the risk of the disk crashing while overwriting the previous backup, but it's simple enough for what I need backed up.

Answer 10

I schedule mozy to run daily (usually a time when i'm not using it - like 3am or something). It keeps everything going smoothly and can be set to only alert if a backup attempt has failed. Its very maintenance-free and has never failed me when i needed it most.

Answer 11

I recently started using UbuntuOne, a straightforward folder replication service for Ubuntu GNU/Linux clients. SImple enough that I've moved my main desktop machine to Ubuntu from a different distro to simply backup working files and to have files easily accessible between my main desktop and laptop.

My last remaining MS Windows box has a free Mozy.com account for backing up data files.

Both Mozy and UbuntuOne update automatically as files within their scope are created or updated.

Linux off-site data backups are done via rsync to a rsync.net server.

Bulk backups are done to a couple of 1TB USB external drives, overwritten when new backups are done. DVDs are used for historical snapshots, mainly of binary-format files as most important text-based files are version controlled anyway.