Your backup habits?

[Brian-M]

How do you backup your personal files and how often do you do it?

I'm just wondering about other people's habits in this because I've been fairly lax in that department.

Until yesterday my most recent backup was a bunch of files which I keep on a 64GB thumb drive on my keyring, and even that hadn't been updated for a fairly long time. Certainly not this year.

I do have an external 1TB HDD which used to contain backup files. But my occasional enthusiasm for ripping parts of my DVD collection resulted in my running out of space, and so I eventually started deleting the backup files on that drive to make more room for them. (I rip the DVDs without transcoding, which means I end up with very large file sizes, but with no loss of quality.)

I've recently been considering what to do about drive space and planning to upgrade my hard-drives, so that I can have proper backups and room for more DVD rips. I was thinking of starting off by buying a 4TB internal drive a few months from now, and a 4TB external drive to back that up at a later date.

But then I realized that I was being silly by thinking so far forward but ignoring the present, and that the main thing to start with was to backup my files properly.

So yesterday I deleted enough of the movies from the external drive so that I could create a disk image of the 200GB partition on my current hard drive where I keep my personal files (I can always rip the DVDs again later), and made some scripts to automatically package a lot of the files on the drive into tarballs that could be easily copied to the thumb drive.

Previously I'd simply been copying the folders containing the files directly, but I have a huge number of small files so it takes forever to copy. Copying a disk image or large tarballs seems quicker (although slightly less convenient for accessing them).

So how do you backup? Do you, copy the files directly, make disk images, use a RAID system, use specialized software, store your files remotely, or something else?

And how often do you backup? Or is it set up to do that automatically?

 

[Magrat]

Because we lost all our family photos when we moved out of Alaska, we have those set to automatically back up to the amazon cloud from our cell phones. Otherwise I upload them to Facebook, which provides the same benefit, even if I keep them private.

Documents I have on a "gorilla" thumb drive. We have had two thumb drives break so we got this super sturdy unbreakable one. So I have a copy of the document on the laptop hard drive, and a copy on the thumb drive. If it is something I know I will need regularly I also will upload it to the Google document drive.

I would say to do it as often as possible so you don't regret not doing it if something happens.

 

[ComfySlippers]

External 5Tb drive.
One partition for holding the TimeMachine data, (Yay for Macs), another for Laptop/Shared stuff.

Cloud Storage. I have all the usual suspects, iCloud, OneDrive etc.
pCloud is very nice. I have about 65Gb there. Just filled about 40gb of it syncing all my important Mac folders.
pCloud syncs totally automatically and transparently. No input required.

Sent from my iNsomniPad using Tapatalk

 

[blutoski]

Like RogueKitten, I use AWS.
There are 3rd party apps that provide a satisfactory user interface. On my Macs I use Arq.

This is in addition to Time Capsule.

My preference is for dual backups, and for one of them to be offsite.

When I was a kid, we had a house fire and all our family photos were destroyed, so I made sure my legacy photos/slides were scanned, and the offsite backup will provide a reasonable recovery of both personal photos and massmarket media. The only thing I won't be able to replace in a total loss like that would be the LPs I inherited from my dad.

 

[Giordano]

I use Time Machine (on a Mac laptop) and a Time Capsule WiFi link. Every time I enter my office and turn on my laptop it is automatically backed up (first every hour, then every day). If I need to go back, I find a date on the backup, click on it, and the entire desktop, folders, and files are exactly like they were on that date. It is great! I've used it 2 or 3 times to recover old files and it worked like a champ.

I do not want to start yet another Mac vs PC fight- I am certain that there are equivalent apps for Windows. What I like about it is that it is automatic, and I configured it, wireless (so I don't have to plug it in and my backup can be hidden away from the actual computer). In the past when I did backups manually, I was often amazed by how much time had passed since the last backup.

My pure work computers use a RAID system to produce functional redundancy in the backup discs. Overkill on my mixed personal/work at home files.

 

[Giordano]

Like RogueKitten, I use AWS.
There are 3rd party apps that provide a satisfactory user interface. On my Macs I use Arq.

This is in addition to Time Capsule.

My preference is for dual backups, and for one of them to be offsite.

When I was a kid, we had a house fire and all our family photos were destroyed, so I made sure my legacy photos/slides were scanned, and the offsite backup will provide a reasonable recovery of both personal photos and massmarket media. The only thing I won't be able to replace in a total loss like that would be the LPs I inherited from my dad.

I agree- one backup should be offsite! A fire or a flood can destroy both the original and an on-site backup.

One concern I have heard about- ransom-ware hacking. Malware can be passed to the backup as well as the files you care about. Ideally the backup or recovery system should have a way of screening out the malware or working around it. One doesn't want the same problem in one's backup as has emerged as a threat on one's computer itself. I understand that creating disk-images can help, but I am far from an expert.

 

[Magrat]

I don't have anything so critically important that I would be a victim of ransomware, so the photo backups are plenty for me. If you have a business or something by all means find something more secure than amazon.

Sent from my XT1585 using Tapatalk

 

[Trebuchet]

I like the rear view camera when I back up, but you can't rely on it altogether because the wide angle lens makes pedestrians look farther away than the really are.

Wait, were we talking about computers or something?

 

[ComfySlippers]

I like the rear view camera when I back up, but you can't rely on it altogether because the wide angle lens makes pedestrians look farther away than the really are.
...

Today's bacon sandwich has been won!

 

[calebprime]

I use Time Machine (on a Mac laptop) and a Time Capsule WiFi link. Every time I enter my office and turn on my laptop it is automatically backed up (first every hour, then every day). If I need to go back, I find a date on the backup, click on it, and the entire desktop, folders, and files are exactly like they were on that date. It is great! I've used it 2 or 3 times to recover old files and it worked like a champ.

...

Does Time Machine only make a backup when a file changes? I've never been clear about that. If it makes a backup even if a file hasn't changed, isn't that a huge amount of redundancy, a huge amount of data? I'm sure it's more sophisticated than that.

 

[Giordano]

Does Time Machine only make a backup when a file changes? I've never been clear about that. If it makes a backup even if a file hasn't changed, isn't that a huge amount of redundancy, a huge amount of data? I'm sure it's more sophisticated than that.

It indexes the files when you initially turned it on and backs them all up. From that point on it only backups any changes made to this initial index.

I have two Macs backed up to a single 1 Tera drive for over 5 years and I still have lots of room left- I think more than half. And this includes lots of photographs and some video. I can add yet more drives in the future if I need to.

 

[MRC_Hans]

Crash Plan. Automatic back-up every ... I think I set it to three hours (which is ridiculously often), but ...

There is a fee, but very reasonable.

Hans

 

[ComfySlippers]

Does Time Machine only make a backup when a file changes? I've never been clear about that. If it makes a backup even if a file hasn't changed, isn't that a huge amount of redundancy, a huge amount of data? I'm sure it's more sophisticated than that.

It perks into action every hour.
So, during a 24 hour period, you can "roll back" to any hour of your choosing.
Mine spends about a minute per hour, (maximum, I'm guessing), doing this.
It's not just the obvious that might have changed between backups, it literally is a system snapshot.
It is also deleting an older back, from ages ago, with the present one.

It deletes the oldest as it goes along, so space is never an issue.
If I were to want to restore to a previous state right now,
I could choose any hourly back up from within the last 24 hours,
Any daily back up from the last week,
Any weekly back up from the last month,
Any monthly back up from the past year.
Etc.

ETA: No idea why "perks" happened but I'm sticking with it.

 

[blutoski]

Does Time Machine only make a backup when a file changes? I've never been clear about that. If it makes a backup even if a file hasn't changed, isn't that a huge amount of redundancy, a huge amount of data? I'm sure it's more sophisticated than that.

It is. It's standard for backup tools to use what's called 'incremental' strategy. TM is also intelligent enough to only update subelements of packages, rather than the whole package. For example, the Photos Library.

 

[Donn]

I'm not in a position* of the luxury of serious Internet backups. You lot don't know how fortunate you are.
(* Cost of b/w and treacle speed.)

On my Linux system I use rsync. It cannot be beat.

I have a script that time and qwerty has whittled into a "just works" solution. Every few months I haul my external menagerie from their dark places hidden in cupboards (physical theft is a concern) and usb them. The script sees all and knows all. When they are mounted, they become targets for rsync.

In the interim I run it manually after a day of design/dev and it goes to a second internal drive.

Rsync is neat because it sends file differences; if there's no difference, nothing is copied. It takes a while at first — to establish the initial copy — but thereafter it's very fast.

Recently I started backing up to Google Drive (free) — but only small, important work tarballs.
(For this look into gdrive. It's darn good! https://github.com/prasmussen/gdrive)

 

[ComfySlippers]

pCloud has a Linux syncing app.
Along with the usual OSX, Windows, iOS, Android and WebBrowser options.
Free, unless you want to pay for oodles or encryption
I'm on 65gb for free.
Encryption to all the Cloud services is easy, and free, if wanted by using -insert name of App I've forgotten-

 

[Brian-M]

My preference is for dual backups, and for one of them to be offsite.

That's one reason I keep copies of the major stuff on my keyring. If the house burns down, or is robbed, or something else happens when I'm out, I'll still have a copy with me.

(I've been thinking that maybe I should keep the external drive hidden in the garage when I'm not using it. The garage isn't connected to the house, so if the house burns down, I'll still have the drive. On the other hand, having to retrieve the drive each time would tend to discourage me from backing up as often.)

When I was a kid, we had a house fire and all our family photos were destroyed, so I made sure my legacy photos/slides were scanned, and the offsite backup will provide a reasonable recovery of both personal photos and massmarket media.

That's understandable. I scanned a lot of family photos into the computer when I was a teenager, and I wouldn't want to lose them. I've got them backed up on DVDs and CDs as well. It would take a huge amount of effort to try and find and re-scan the photos. But I might try it next time I travel interstate to visit family.

(I do regret not saving them at a much higher resolution than I did, but back then there was very limited disk space and our computer only had a 640x480 resolution monitor, so none of them were saved at more than 640 pixels wide.)

The only thing I won't be able to replace in a total loss like that would be the LPs I inherited from my dad.

Why not record them to the computer?

I've occasionally bought an LP from a second-hand store, and recorded it to the computer by connecting the turntable to the line-in socket on my computer. After saving each side as a WAV file (ETA: and after normalizing the recording), I then go through and break it up into individual songs which I save as MP3s.

It takes time, but the end result is equivalent to having ripped the LP to the computer the same way you'd rip a CD.

 

[Desert Fox]

Copy on my desktop main drive
Copy on my desktop external drive
Copy on my laptop main drive
Copy on my portable drive

I also have a few older portable drives from when I updated that have copies of much of my older stuff on them as well.

 

[xterra]

Sunday morning schedule:

Run Rkill
Run TDSSKiller
Run a registry cleaner
Run Malawarebytes
Attach 1Tb external hard drive via USB
Run a batch file that uses robocopy to back up the desktop, documents, photos, and a couple of other directories, on an incremental basis
Remove external drive and put it away until next Sunday

 

[jenspen]

Life is so much easier now for those of us who are neurotic about backing up our data and planting it in different places for security's sake.

Nowadays, every time a personal file changes it is backed up to the cloud and synched between my different clients. I tried three cloud services and stuck with the one I found easiest to use with Linux - Dropbox (I'm paying $AU109 p.a. for 1 Terabyte). I've been using Dropbox for about 3 years and no hiccups so far.

I also back up to an external hard drive when I remember to (like right now).