For my Mac machines I use Time Machine. I alternate weekly backups between two external HDDs, rotating them between my home office and my car. I have also built two thumb drive installers with my current version of MacOS and keep one with each backup HDD just in case I need to perform an offline recovery to a blank HDD. So, I'm covered for theft, fire, ransomware, and software/hardware failure, in fact just about everything short of an EMP event.
My axe of choice is Linux. I use LVM2 for my filesystem container and automatically snapshot my hot filesystems twice a day to an internal HDD using rsnapshot. Weekly, I partclone my filesystems to one of two sets of external HDDs that rotate between my home office and my car. I also keep multiple thumb drives loaded with Clonezilla and bootable Linux.
Grudgingly, I use Windows 7 and 10 in virtual machines to run software only available for that environment or to test cross platform compatibility. Since these live on virtual disk images, they get backed up with either the MacOS or Linux. To keep from backing up each entire VDI on every incremental backup, I use Virtual Box snapshots. I've found Window's backup software to be just about useless.
Over the years I've had several HDD failures, but have never, ever lost more than a few hours work.
(Score: 1) by crunchy_one on Monday November 30 2020, @06:07PM
For my Mac machines I use Time Machine. I alternate weekly backups between two external HDDs, rotating them between my home office and my car. I have also built two thumb drive installers with my current version of MacOS and keep one with each backup HDD just in case I need to perform an offline recovery to a blank HDD. So, I'm covered for theft, fire, ransomware, and software/hardware failure, in fact just about everything short of an EMP event.
My axe of choice is Linux. I use LVM2 for my filesystem container and automatically snapshot my hot filesystems twice a day to an internal HDD using rsnapshot. Weekly, I partclone my filesystems to one of two sets of external HDDs that rotate between my home office and my car. I also keep multiple thumb drives loaded with Clonezilla and bootable Linux.
Grudgingly, I use Windows 7 and 10 in virtual machines to run software only available for that environment or to test cross platform compatibility. Since these live on virtual disk images, they get backed up with either the MacOS or Linux. To keep from backing up each entire VDI on every incremental backup, I use Virtual Box snapshots. I've found Window's backup software to be just about useless.
Over the years I've had several HDD failures, but have never, ever lost more than a few hours work.