Your home backup strategy [closed]

Question

What is your recommended backup strategy for home computers? I have two computers - desktop and notebook. All the important data is store on the desktop computer. I am currently using Mozy to backup my data from desktop computer to Mozy servers. What do you use?

Answer 1

acronis trueimage for desktop backups. tar for server/NAS backups. For NAS I've had an idea to buy a tape drive but bought 4x1TB external hdds instead. Much more cheap and can be "rotated" by script. Imho tape drive is good after amounts near ~10TB otherwise waste of money.

Answer 2

Server: OpenFiler on commodity hardware

RAID-5 Partition (5x160GB) : Used as primary storage for desktops on home network. Laptop syncs to this partition via Maebo Sync. Primary desktop folders redirected here. CIFS shares used for Photos, Music, etc.

Additional storage on openfiler (large SATA): iSCSI back to primary desktop, used for holding video files or other large data that is transient and doesn't need redundancy. Lives on openfiler to simplify desktop configuration rather than external USB or other attached method.

Additional storage on openfiler (RAID-0, 2 disks) : Used as backup destination for critical RAID-5 data using CrashPlan. Holds friend's data as repository for his Crashplan backups.

CrashPlan also used to back up RAID-5 data offsite to a friend

Answer 3

I am using Mozy and Windows Live Sync. Mozy on one desktop backs up everything except pictures and videos. Windows Live Sync syncs every files across several my computers. The nice thing about Live Sync is no size limitation. It syncs files through p2p.

Answer 4

I have three computers at home (there's no "server"), one of them in a different building from the other two.

So I wrote a small Python script which does a normal backup every 20 days and differential backups daily. It's scheduled to run on the idle event of each computer, and after generating the archives it replicates them via shared folders, besides deleting those which are 60 days or older. This way every computer has a complete set of archives of all computers and I don't need to worry about copying them to offline media periodically, although I occasionally (once every 2 months) burn a DVD with the newest archives.

Answer 5

I have a large external hard drive that I back up to using Time Machine, and for off-site backup I use Backblaze, which I'm quite happy with.

Answer 6

For my personal laptop, i simply copy whole user profile to NAS weekly. Monthly i write most important data to DVDs. My girlfriend has a 2.5" HDD connected to her TP X41's dock and uses Vista's daily backup. Also - most important data to DVD's monthly.

It's simple and it works.

Answer 7

I set up Areca Backup for my parents. Simple to use, nice GUI, cross-platform (Java+SWT), and free software.

It allows for full, incremental & differential backups. It writes backups as files, i.e. needs a filesystem for backup files (hard disk, network drive etc.); it can also backup to an FTP server.

It has no built-in scheduler, but integrates nicely with Windows Scheduler or cron (which I actually prefer). It can even send email on completion of jobs.

It's not an enterprise backup system, but just the right feature set for home backups.

I set it up for automatic backup to an external harddrive; a few critical files are put on an FTP account.

Answer 8

I use two external hard drives in rotation: one at home, the other one 'offsite'. Every month, both drives are exchanged. So worst case scenario, the house burns down and I loose one month of data !

Answer 9

Time Machine on my home machine; my laptops just synchronize with a popular web service. I essentially have two backups of my mission-critical data (Time Machine on-site once it's synchronized from the cloud, which is instantaneous, and the cloud itself).

It could potentially be better, but for my needs it's proven more than adequate: I've had a few catastrophic failures from which I have recovered, with minimal effort, 100 % of my data.

I used to have an in-house Slackware box with 4 500 GB hard disks in a RAID array as a tertiary in-house NAS backup solution, but I've given that up because it simply wasn't necessary and required maintenance, which my current solution does not.