Open Thread: What’s Your Backup Strategy?
November 14th, 2007 (11:00am) Mike Gunderloy 39 CommentsTweet This
We’ve talked a lot about backup options in past months. You can go offsite with a service like Amazon S3 or Mozy. If you’ve upgraded to Leopard, there’s the shiny new Time Machine. You can copy everything you care about to a second hard drive, burn CDs, or (if you have truly antique hardware) keep backup tapes. There are even hacks to let you use GMail as a big backup service.
With all the choices out there, what do you do to backup your critical data? Do you store redundant copies of data in your own office? Use one of the offsite backup services (which one)? Or are you living dangerously with no backups at all? We’d love to hear your backup success (or horror) stories, and why you’ve chosen the path you have. Share them in the comments!
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Important data on local hard drives is backed up to a NAT drive in my home. The hole in my backup plan is the photo and music library that lives in on the NAT drive. I’m not presently backing those up anywhere, and I need to fix that sooner rather than later. I used to copy them to a spare hard drive, but that drive got re purposed for another use. The plan is to get a USB drive to plug into the NAT drive, just haven’t gotten around to doing it yet. My son is getting a XBox for Christmas. Does anybody know if it would be easy to mirror the photos and music to the hard drive in the Xbox?
I’m reluctant to go online because of the volume of data. 50 GB is a lot of music and photos to copy up on a DSL line that rarely exceeds 768 kbs outbound.
Right now I’m using only Time Machine, but I plan to buy a second external drive soon to make weekly bootable offsite backups with SuperDuper (which is what I used before Time Machine.)
I only have 1 laptop computer that I use for Work and Home use. To backup, I have a BAT file that I run every few days (manually) and I back it up to an external harddrive that site on my desk.
On an event driven basis (e.g. client project ended or is at a transition point), I will manually backup the critical stuff to Amazone S3.
My upcoming plan is to continue with the BAT file for convenience, but add JungleDisk + backup software to auto backup to Amazone S3 more regularly. Nice thing about JungleDisk is that it can encrypt the data as it goes up to S3, so even no one at Amazon could read it.
I’m using a mixture of back to my mac to maintain mirror drives on multiple macs, harddrives with time machine, .mac (slow, limited space, but works great across multiple macs), google docs (for iphone access / reading on the go but max doc size is a pain), box.net (slick interface and fast, but limited space and not secure), and mac mozy (shouldn’t have paid for it –slow, inflexible and rarely works despite multiple version upgrades and lots of unresolved tickets with tech support… Works fine on PCs)
I use a couple things to backup my computers in my home office. I use MozyHome for my main development system so I can get my work offsite. I also use Acronis TrueImage to backup the handful of other systems I have here and back them up to external USB drives.
I’ve been using Time Machine on my iMac at home since upgrading to Leopard. On my ThinkPad at work, I’m using the Carbonite online backup service. It continuously backs up my files to a remote server, and offers unlimited storage space. Highly recommended.
I’m using a mix of external hard drives and Carbonite.
I use
(disclosure: I’m a programmer for SpiderOak)
We do distributed development using Trac and IRC to coordinate. I write Python that runs on Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu. I like SpiderOak, because they pay me, and because I can back up and restore across platforms in a secure enviromnment.
I use SpiderOak http://www.spideroak.com
(disclosure: I’m a programmer for SpiderOak)
We do distributed development using Trac and IRC to coordinate. I write Python that runs on Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu. I like SpiderOak, because they pay me, and because I can back up and restore across platforms in a secure enviromnment.
I back up my work documents once a day at 3 p.m. to offsite storage (my .mac account) via Backup on my Mac. At noon each day, I backup my personal documents the same way. Once a week (early, early Saturday morning), I backup my family photos and video to an external drive. I have the backup app Bandwagon running constantly to backup my iTunes music folder to offsite storage on Amazon S3. I’d love to find a similar service that would backup my photos/video to Amazon S3 also.
Running on a Linux system, I use the excellent rsnapshot utility to do daily backups of critical files (mainly my home directory). At the moment it just copies to another folder on the same drive. I will soon be investing in a couple of large USB drives to allow for off-site backup.
A friend of mine recently set up a backup strategy involving two USB drives being connected at any one time, being mirrored using software raid to tolerate a single drive failure. For off-site backup, he simply swaps one of the USB drives with a third one (which the raid software will automatically re-sync up).
Notes on this are available on his blog for those interested.
You could probably do a similar thing on a Mac (which is UNIX based under the hood) but not sure if it would be possible under Windows.
1. I have all of my important documents (about 300gb worth) on an internal hard drive. That hard drive is backed up to two external hard drives. One of those is always at an offsite location (I swap them daily).
2. Weekly, I back up everything to DVD-Rs.
3. Now, am also backing up everything to Amazon S3 using JungleDisk.
Mozy, tho their client’s been wonky lately. I assume cos I’m on a pretty slow DSL. That’s the only thing that changed. I also back up nightly to a network backup drive from buffalo. Tho that’s also been wonky – support tells me to reformat. And then I use mp3tunes.com to back up my music, cos it’s about 80gb unto itself. So right now I’ve actually been thinking about revisiting my plan.
I have a routine very similar to Brian’s above. I backup to two different external drives (both 500GB). I keep one at home and one at a safe deposit box at the bank that I rent for $25 a year. I swap them out every other week or so. I also have an “Important Documents” folder that is backed up daily to a Truecrypt encrypted container and uploaded to my web host servers via ftp. This container also, of course, is backed up to the external drives.
I am absolutely paranoid about losing data—too much of my life is on the computer’s hard drive. So: Stuff that I spend a lot of time and effort on, and that would be really painful to lose (like financial spreadsheets and research and writing) I backup periodically as I work on them, to a USB drive. When I close the file, Data Deposit Box backs it up automatically ($2 a month for 2 GB). I then have MozyHome set to backup all changed files, open or closed, every two hours ($4.95 per month for unlimited storage—I currently have 90 GB at Mozy, mostly music). Every night I run Karen’s Replicator for all files I have worked on during the day, backing them up to an external hard disk that is kept onsite. Can I do anything else?!!!
I use Mozy to backup all documents. I use Carbon Copy Cloner once a week and copy everything to an external 500GB drive, which sits on my desk at work. Also, I store important files on a USB flash drive in case I do not have access to the Internet. I keep the USB flash drive in my backpack, along with backup tapes from work.
I use two external drives to backup data. My primary external drive remains connected to my central computer and contains everything except for OS files, fluff, etc. Once a month, I backup my primary external drive via my secondary, which is then locked up in a fire-proof safe for good measure. I have found this method to be very efficient and effective, much faster than burning DVD backups or uploading everything online.
I had planned on using Time Machine but I’m one of the many who are having issues. I just switched from Win XP where I was using Acronis True Image.
My backup strategy? Multiple redundancy. Mozy to backup system configuration. Jungle Disk ( with Amazon S3 ) for documents and critical applications. All my documents are backed up to a FreeBSD based NAS (FreeNAS) in my basement. Soon I will add a Time Machine to the mix when my miniStack V3 drive arrives.
I use Mozy generally as an automatic backup daily. Then weekly I transfer my “work” folder from my work PC to my Home PC as a backup just in case.
Anthony
1 TB Internal drive with Leopard on.
1TB external drive – Time Machine
1TB external drive – SuperDuper copy of internal drive
External drive – disconnected – with photos on
Amazon S3 – for really important stuff and also more photos!
I use a Mac…
I use Mondoarchive on Linux. It writes DVD sized ISO images. A script run by a nightly cron job backs up my home directories, full backup on a Sunday night, incremental the rest of the week, written to an external USB hard drive.
The system files are backed up every now and then, particularly before a major system upgrade, also using Mondoarchive, but writing direct to DVD-RW.
All of my projects are kept under version control using SVN, stored on a server on the other side of the country which is itself backed up nightly.
What I don’t yet do, but should, is copy the weekly full backup to another hard disk or DVD set. This is more an issue at home, where I have photos and video that are not version controlled and are only backed up onsite. That’s the next thing I want to take care of.
I’m a fan of online backup – your backups happen automatically, and you get that extra security of having an offsite copy of your data.
I looked at Mozy, but I don’t think much to their 30 day file retention policy and the fact that their prices are ‘per PC’. I found Angel Backup (http://www.AngelBackup.com) to offer a better service if you have multiple PCs to backup.
I use SyncBack SE from http://www.2brightsparks.com/ to run scheduled backups to external hard drives, and also to do backups to FTP servers for critical stuff that we want to keep off site. Great stuff.
I’m Carbonite’s CEO and I would like to mention a few findings from some recent market research that we conducted.
The first result, which should not come as a surprise, is that labor intensive methods of backing up, such as burning a stack of DVDs, manually copying files to an external drive or a “drive in the cloud” fall into disuse very quickly. Most people just don’t have the discipline or motivation to get involved with daily backups. Consumers also seem to resist scheduled backups that require leaving their computers turned on — 72% said they want to be able to turn their PCs off when they are finished. Most consumers, 91% to be precise, are not aware that automated online backup services like Carbonite or Mozy even exist. Such services appeal to small business and consumers because they work in the background throughout the day and, once installed, require no further thought on the part of the user. Consumers like these services because they get a lot of benefit with very little effort — 98% of Carbonite users report that they would recommend the service to a friend or relative.
Regarding products that combine backup with collaboration, such as photo sharing or file sharing, while it’s not a difficult technical challenge to combine these functions, it does create a marketing challenge. Photo sharing and similar applications are sold with happy smiling people enjoying their application, whereas backup is sold on the basis of fear — that’s the only thing that motivates people to buy backup solutions.
David Friend, CEO
Carbonite, Inc.
Carbonite Online Backup
I am CEO of Zoogmo which is a cool backup program that offers FREE and UNLIMITED backup. At Zoogmo we know that off site automatic backup is the best solution for most users out there who really don’t want to have to think about backup every day but need their files backed up on a regular basis.
With Zoogmo you control where your files are backed up by building a backup network of your own or your friends’ computers. You can even backup to an external hard drive of your choice.
Zoogmo runs silently in the background and automatically backs up ALL of your data over the internet, using a combination of Triple-DES and AES 256 encryption to make sure that only you have access to your files.
Check out Zoogmo at http://www.zoogmo.com to download Zoogmo for free and begin turning your social network into your backup network.
Remember, with Zoogmo you have no annoying monthly fees – totally free unlimited backup you can trust!
Dov Sugarman
Zoogmo – Your Online Backup Community
Well, I’m no CEO of any Backup solutions company, and I won’t recommend any backup solution. Our company has been dealing for the last 22 years with the resurrection of the dead, …meaning by this: failed backups, or I should rather write “failed restoring processes”?
Coming from this field of data recovery (IT disaster recovery) I can nothing but say that automatic backup is great, remote backup is even better, online backup is theoretically a magical solution against users’ and IT managers’ worst fears, and still… all this would be true, wouldn’t they all require a recovery process to enable the access to and use of the backed up data.
Paul Mah mentioned this week the BOS -Backup prOxy Server software in the TechRepublic blog – http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/wireless/?p=159 –
This is one small system (free for home users, licensed for enterprises) that skips the need for any recovery process. Although it has it all (Automatic incremental backup, pre-restored files, folders, mailboxes, brick level Exchange & Outlook, historical versions, deleted files management, pure forensic disk images, and many more goodies) the main issue here is the speed and independency of recovery. Even if the OS and the BOS application are down, you will still be able to restore the data.
Worth to give it a try. As promised, It’s not about backup – ONLY RESTORE (..and in a blink).
Request free download at http://www.bos.co.il/150163
All the best,
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Hello all,
I am using Mozy for quite sometime, and it gives good backup solution BUT, the real problem is the restore procedure which in my opinion is very poor. Especially, if you need to restore all (or most) of your files to a completely new computer due to a hard disk crash or a stolen laptop. Lately I started to use Carbonite and Carbonite current version is a real art when it comes to restore your data. I wrote complete reviews about both, MozyHome and Carbonite, and both are wonderful solutions, but for the home user or small office, I find Carbonite to be better.
1. Restore
2. Les settings, more friendly
3. You can know what is backed up from the Windows Explorer.
4. Version support for 90!! days
5. Phone support (MozyHome does not include phone support and it cost more than Carbonite).
Lastly, I love both, I think it is great competition that we, the computer users will benefit from.
Thanks,
Daniel – http://www.backup-answer.com
http://www.backup-answer.com/best-backup-services/carbonite-complete-review/
http://www.backup-answer.com/backup-review/mozy-home-complete-review/
I have just blogged about this on my site.
The main conclusion I came to was that the best backup solution is to have an external hard drive because you get large storage, decent transfer rates, low cost per gigabyte and they are portable.
Whatever backup device you choose you will have to marry it to an automated backup system. I like SyncToy and Robocopy for this.
Use Mozy or Nomadesk, buy a rugged netbook, and get a netbook as a backup machine. IMAO the best solution for for now. Also use encryption software, and don’t store passwords in your machines.
I’m the CEO of Ultrasonic Subliminals, which has nothing to do with backup solutions. But I do use a backup solution, and it’s a very good one.
My primary system is a Vista/Linux dual boot, and I use MondoArchive to backup and restore. The nice thing about Mondo is that it backs up the whole disk… the only thing it does not back up as of this moment is encrypted partitions. Since we use TrueCrypt, the simple solution is to move my data from an encrypted partition to an encrypted file container. as a file on a recognized file system (in this case, EXT3), the encrypted container will be backed up too.
Mondo can do bare metal recovery and do it fully automatically or allow any degree of user control. It can back up to hard disk, external drive, network, USB key, CD, DVD, and tape. It produces self bootable media, and allows restoration of some, all or none of the data. (Yes, you can choose to restore none of the data.) It also allows for verification of data backed up, and comparison to double verify or detect changes. It backs up and restores NTFS and FAT partitions, too, meaning that when (not if) my build system fails, I can just replace the drive and nuke it (nuke is the automatic restore feature). Mondo has saved my entire business more than once.
It would be nice to find something like this for Windows… especially an off site solution. The closest I have found is still not great… I have had only a 50% success rate with it when restore time came.
Mondo’s not perfect either, but it’s the best I have found so far.