• Let's talk backups
    15 replies, posted
I've just had to restore my laptop from a backup. It's ok because I had some sort of backup protection in place. Most of my documents were on dropbox - but I was limited by the free storage limit. The rest of my files for University were on Crash Plan - but I'm now trying to restore 250Gb of files and even on a 100Mbit (university) network connection, the recovery process is really slow (somehow capped at 3Mbit/s down). I'm thinking of getting a NAS, but I don't want to have the headache of managing the backups on that myself. My other alternative is to go for Google Drive - who offer unlimited storage for about £6 a month. Has anyone got a good system in place for how they do backups?
I don't have 100% reliable protection (no off-site backup) but here it is what I do: 1) Files which I use fairly often are [I]backed up[/I] to my home NAS (2x3TB in RAID 1) daily using FreeFileSync and Windows Scheduler. 2) Files which I don't use for a long period of time (raw camera footage) are manually [I]moved[/I] to NAS and external HDD so they don't take space on my PC HDD's. 3) Somewhere on the cloud storage I have very old backup of some of my files. [I][B]Don't do this. Setup proper backup to the cloud if you need it. Any good NAS (Synology, QNAP) has built-in backup to popular external services. [/B][/I]Basically if you don't need to store a lot of data, you ready to pay monthly fee and you sure you are not going to be affected by the possible limits (only specific file extensions allowed or maximum file size) then cloud storage will be enough for you. But if you need to store a lot of data (>1tb) without any limits then NAS + (optional) selective backup to cloud might be a better choice. Since you are using a Mac, NAS + Time Machine might be very good choice for you.
I have like less than 10 gb to backup so I just send it to my owncloud. I try to only backup necessities that I'd die without such as pgp keys, I have install discs all over the damn place and my internet is decent enough to redownload the rest.
You're capped at 3Mbps down because your university's network admins are smart. I don't personally know of any backup methods that are cheap and easy. In my experience those two things don't really go together unless you're some Linux wizard. I've always used an external and just prayed...
I try to keep my backups as small as possible, so they fit on pretty much anything. Currently I think I have about 4gb max. which is divided onto 2 USB sticks and the micro SD in my smartphone. Obviously not fail proof, but I somewhere heard the saying "a file doesn't exist, unless it's been copied 3 times" and somehow that makes sense.
Home server backs up to every day to a second home server, which is just a glorified iSCSI target. Manually instigated backup to an external hard drive every few weeks, which is stored off-site. No need for any cloud or paid services. Just Windows Server Backup, robocopy and rsync.
i back up to my nas, external hdd, server, dropbox and amazon cloud drive, but that's pretty much only photos/videos anyway
Well since online might not be an option, do you go home semi often from university? If so I'd recommend grabbing 2 external drives and just swap them out every time you go home. Then you have the most recent backup in the dorms(I assume) with you and a decently recent one offsite at home.
Anybody here an Acronis user? [URL]http://www.acronis.com/en-us/personal/computer-backup/[/URL] I love it because not only does it backup my files, it backs up my software, licenses, games, OS, and all my configurations. It's an image backup. Even if my PC exploded, I could buy new storage disk(s) and restore my entire pc back to where it was. Right now each backup TIB file (Acronis image file) for me is about the size of all my used data, but it only takes a couple hours to backup, and restoring is an easy process as well. You can even make a bootable usb drive version of the software (my recommended approach) and make backups/restores from that. The one caveat being that you will need a decent sized backup drive (external drive or [URL="http://aluratek.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/u/s/usb_3-0-external-sata-hard-drive-dual-duplicator-front-drives-inserted_1.jpg"]usb drive bay[/URL]) to put the Acronis TIB files onto. But you'll probably be needing that for any kind of backup solution anyway... Highly recommended.
Acronis is good but it is a good idea to validate image after making it. I've had a few times when image was damaged somehow and I was unable to use it. Also the downside of using acronis (or any other image backup software) is a requirement to have it installed even if you need to restore just one file.
My backup procedures are pretty new and haven't really been tested yet, but I'm about a week in so far. My main desktop regularly connects to my VPS and pulls down databases, etc. That desktop and my laptop use Duplicati to create daily incremental backups to Amazon Cloud Drive. The software is pretty good and handles the necessities like encryption and compression out of the box. Regarding your issue, Brt has had a wild experience with CrashPlan. Issues with their client and bandwidth on their side, etc.
My projects folders are synced between my desktop and laptop via Syncthing, that's the only frequently-accessed important data I have. Other stuff, I just keep copies on all hard drives, so if one of them dies, two drives still have it. But honestly, don't have much information I consider important.
[QUOTE=deadeye536;50615514]Brt has had a wild experience with CrashPlan. Issues with their client and bandwidth on their side, etc.[/QUOTE] I'm finding the same. The bandwidth issue is with them- and the worse thing is, they haven't responded to my support ticket about it. Who's Brt?? I've decided I won't be renewing my crashplan subscription. Instead im going to try google drive unlimited. $10 a month isn't that much (given I'm already paying $5 for Google apps, it's only a marginal increase). I've also just bought a synology nas and have loaded it with 4x3Tb disks. I have all my files in my documents folder - this syncs up to Google Drive and to my NAS. This means I always have files (about 400Gb of photos, 200Gb of work) locally on my disk (to use), on my network (for fast restore) and on cloud (for disaster recovery). I stream the big files (tv/movies) from my NAS.
My backup system involves a realtime sync to my dedicated server hosted in a DC (Using Freefilesync) The at midnight everything gets uploaded to amazon AWS. I dont keep my TVs and movies backed up since I can grab them again if / when I ever need them
I do nightly incremental backups to both a local RAID 1 array and to my VPS using [URL="https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/"]borg backup[/URL] My backup for last night took 33GB of data and deduplicated it down to 23MB: [code] Original size Compressed size Deduplicated size This archive: 33.91 GB 33.75 GB 23.86 MB All archives: 2.02 TB 2.00 TB 111.60 GB[/code] I have snapshots going back 2 years and it's only taking up 111GB.
I was thinking of picking up a Synology NAS with two 3 TB NAS drives using RAID 1. I had a few questions though: 1. Which free software would you reccomend for Windows 10 to perform automatic backups. 2. Would what I have be good enough for a couple Blu-Ray movie rips (10-20), a large music library, and a bunch of personal files? 3. Is there a way to encrypt the NAS drives on the Synology Firmware? 4. What can I do now to back up my data while saving for my setup? I got 2x1 TB external drives, and Google drive 5. I decided to use SOS Backups for my cloud backup. Would I be able to upload my 500GB+ music library, and 100GB+ Blu-ray rip library (Everything's legit, borrowed CDs/Blu-Rays from friends and personal collection).
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