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How do you backup your data at home?
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(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Friday August 28 2015, @10:57AM
My main storage is a NAS box, which backs up to another NAS box which then backs up to a USB Drive.
(Score: 5, Funny) by mhajicek on Sunday August 30 2015, @09:49PM
I have an offsite backup at the NSA. The hard part is restoring from it.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1) by Murdoc on Thursday September 03 2015, @04:22AM
I hear that Win10 is going to be offering that feature.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday August 31 2015, @11:43PM
I use CrashPlan. I have each machine back up to both an internal server (free!) and CrashPlan's servers (not free). If you have friends with lots of disk space, you can back up to their machines as well, perhaps dropping CrashPlan's cloud backups. It's really important to have offsite backups somewhere though.
As with every backup solution, restoration is really important, and due to stupidity, I've tested mine more than once. It works well, and the on-site backups makes it really quick and convenient. I'd post a referral link, but I don't think they do that. Have a look, even if you just back up locally it's pretty slick with scheduling, de-duplication, backup sets, etc.
(Score: 1) by nnet on Friday August 28 2015, @11:44AM
SAN.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Friday August 28 2015, @01:49PM
Incremental backups using rsync onto a NAS...which also serves as my steambox and media center. Still a work in progress though. I'm planning to add RAID and a pair of 4TB hot swap drives and eventually do some offsite rotation of those. But that's still a few thousand bucks away.
(Score: 5, Informative) by WizardFusion on Friday August 28 2015, @02:17PM
Wait, please tell me you are not planning on removing a hot-swap drive and using that as the offsite backup.? That would be a massively bad idea.
When you put a drive back into the slot the existing drive (assuming RAID-1) will have to undergo a near stress test for the next 8+ hours while it copies all it's data to the new drive. Doing this a few times and the drives will quickly wear out.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday August 31 2015, @12:06PM
Hmm, that's a good point. I was thinking two drives that I rotate in and out so it would only have to sync one or two days worth of changes, but I guess if it's RAID it still probably has to read and compare the entire drive. Maybe I'll just have to do something with rsync...though I was hoping for some small performance gain as well through RAID. That's probably not happening until early next year though so I haven't put THAT much thought into the details yet. Thanks for the advice!
(Score: 2) by schad on Saturday September 05 2015, @05:38PM
Generally, what you're describing isn't actually desirable anyway. I understand your motivations, but you typically want to keep multiple historical versions. For example: What if you delete a file, but don't notice it for a week -- by which time you will have gone through 7 backup cycles? That deleted file will have been gone for 6 backups.
What you can do to achieve something sort of similar is to get a rotation of NASes. The first dump will be costly, and your incrementals will be more expensive than with your original plan, but still not as bad as the full. Plus, this gives you the option of RAID on the NAS, increasing the chances that your data will survive movement to offsite.
It's expensive, so I don't take my own advice (yet). Right now I just back up to FreeNAS, which is a 4-disk raidz of 1TB "enterprise" drives. But it's my eventual goal to do it right.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday September 08 2015, @03:11PM
No, that's what my backup server already does. Every night all of my systems take an incremental backup (using rsync) to the backup server. So if my laptop gets stolen or its hard drive fails or I accidentally delete a file, I've got the backups right there. Right now all those backups live on a single drive in a single server though. Which isn't the worst thing ever since that drive has no unique data, so two separate drives in two separate systems would need to fail before I lose anything current -- which I figure is fairly solid since this is personal, not business. But since several of those systems are always in my apartment together, and therefore would likely fail together in the event of a fire or a hurricane or something, I want to duplicate the entire drive -- with all of those incremental backups -- to an offsite location. When I talk about syncing incremental changes, I'm talking about incremental changes to the backups, not to the main systems.
So, get a second NAS and...do what with it? Disconnect the entire thing and haul it out to my car every morning? That's a bit much. I don't really have anywhere that I could store a second NAS either. I certainly don't have anywhere that I could have it live online at an offsite location. So a second drive is a lot more feasible than a second NAS. Don't really have the budget for a second NAS either.
(Score: 2) by schad on Tuesday September 08 2015, @04:56PM
Just unplug it. A one-inch air gap is enough to protect you against the most common class of problems: botched firmware upgrades, mistakenly replacing the wrong drive, clicking the wrong button in some GUI, and so on.
Yeah, if your house burns down you're screwed. But... if your house burns down you're screwed. I doubt the integrity of your data will be at the forefront of your mind.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday September 08 2015, @07:02PM
That's what the incremental backups are for. The backups of those backups that I'm planning now is specifically for if my house burns down or something like that. These are very different systems running different distros so I doubt they're running much common firmware and they never update together, and I won't be replacing the drive on multiple systems at the same time, and I don't use a GUI tool for backups -- I have an automated script which I don't screw with. Sure, I guess you could come up with some stupid way I could nuke every drive in my home all at once, but it would be pretty difficult. I think I'm more likely to burn the place down.
I can get a new place to live, I can get new computers and new furniture and everything else -- it'd be some work, it'd be expensive, but it would be a simple enough process. But I can't just go on Amazon and buy my data back. That's the one thing in my home that cannot ever be replaced. And there are thousands of hours of work on there. Believe it or not, my data might actually be the most valuable thing I own.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Snow on Friday August 28 2015, @03:39PM
I use a Drobo that I bought 7-8 years ago and I pray that it doesn't shit the bed.
So far, my prayers have been getting answered.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Sunday August 30 2015, @06:43PM
How are those drives holding up?
I know people that initially swore by them, until they started swearing at them.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Monday August 31 2015, @02:54PM
I don't actually access it very much anymore, but it does still work.
It's pretty slow, and when it gets too full (95%+) it's so slow that it's unusable. It's pretty noisy when used if the temperature is even slightly warm. I have had a drive failure in it, and I was able to put in a new drive and everything was good.
Overall, it's a pretty good piece of hardware, but I couldn't recommend one because they are pretty expensive and while they are good, they aren't great.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Friday September 04 2015, @12:03AM
I know some folks that were resellers of drobo hardware--some sort of generic branded backup solution.
The network ports only got about 25MB/s on it though, so it was better than fast ethernet (100mb) but only about 250mb compared to the gigabit it was touted to have.
25MB/s to disk is not very fast; LTO 2 tapes get like 30MB/s. Its a trade for convenience, I guess! I don't really know how quick the drobos were for direct disk access on a good network, but 25MB/s is probably fast enough for most light backup purposes or a few overnight jobs.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Friday September 04 2015, @02:50PM
Direct access is similar in speed. It's good for media, but you don't want to be running any applications off it. It also takes about 20 seconds to spin up the disks when it comes out of standby.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Friday August 28 2015, @05:13PM
I have a tape backup library. Why change tapes when I can rotate them via a robot? I suppose I have to change them occasionally. Backing up VMs was never so easy, and tapes never crash.
Anything important gets placed externally via a secret handhake--with both TCP and physically, since I haven't yet underestimated the bandwidth of a car full of backup tapes. Latency can be poor, though... especially if I am too lazy to make the trip. That physical device may be a tape or a disk drive.
I have tapes that have outlived drives; I probably have tapes that will outlive me. I also have drives that do not work in any of the PCs I presently own; not without having to get an adapter of some kind. I once relied on CDs and DVDs;they are now not only too small, but some of them don't even read any more or they have visible flakes of material that seemingly have disappeared. Write once and read never after long term temperature controlled storage. Vinyl records proved to be a more reliable medium.
Nothing of mine (intentionally) goes to those commercial providers, since it seems unreasonable to mount a series of 150gb VM from them after copying it up at 10mb and trying to continuously sync the differences. A home user can only do so much before having to reason that they aren't giving out terabytes of space for cheap because they want me to encrypt 7zipped files with it over a 10mb connection. The TCP handshake I mentioned goes over a tunnel to hardware I manage. I guess I pay for that convenience since that isn't free.
Then again, I am the type that would run iscsi over dialup because I can, not because it is a good idea. I do not see cloud storage (for my needs) as a good idea, and am not doing it because so many others with differing best interests in mind presume that they can make me without permission. That trust was lost when it was assumed they had it.
Tapes are cheap, reusable, and work great. People are not pleased with the inconveniences tape may bring, but I guess conveniences got them the types of privacy issues we have today, with Windows 8 and 10 presuming you want to save in the cloud over DSL instead of on your local storage at much faster speeds. That isn't backup-- that's the default!!
In any event, I at least resist even if it isn't entirely (or very) effective. It gives me something to complain about, and having passion for something is good, right?
Some day my tape reader will break and I'll cry, but I'll just go on ebay and get another. I already have a few stand alone drives I got for cheap in preparation for that eventual inevitability. If they can read tapes from the Apollo program, I am sure someone will have an tape drive that works for what I have.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Celestial on Friday August 28 2015, @05:33PM
I backup my non-important stuff (comic book PDFs, eBooks, manual PDFs, music, etc.) onto the cloud. Specifically, Tresorit. People already know I'm a geek, I don't care if any of that "gets out there."
The important stuff (photographs, bank statements, tax documents, etc.), now that I backup onto multiple USB drives.
(Score: 1) by saracoth on Friday August 28 2015, @08:10PM
All encrypted. Technically that includes Mozy, but I assume the worst as best practice.
Almost finished with a Debian+LUKS+ZFS build. That'll scratch off #1 in favor of giving ZFS another drive (which doesn't count -- "RAID is not a backup" as they say). I'll probably do some research on #3.
Years ago, I had a series of incremental backup CDs. I ended up writing some software to help me manage when to burn new discs, plus a database to look up which CD to reference if I needed a file. It was a fun project, but I'm glad to have moved on.
Years before that, I suffered my first hard drive failure and lost everything. Fortunately I was young'un, so nothing of value was lost and I've been cautious since.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Friday August 28 2015, @08:49PM
I do two kinds of backup, local and cloud. Local means a few large 2TB+ drives which I sync every now and then using rsync. That is then backed up to my Amazon S3 account using Duplicati.
Local backups are only to defend against hardware failures. A fire will take it all. Cloud backups that you control and encrypt using software of your choice is a backup for your backup. That to me is a true backup. Though, I don't fool myself thinking it is 100% fool proof. But so far it has worked and I have tested it.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Appalbarry on Friday August 28 2015, @11:39PM
Girlfriend's XP box (!) backs up to an external USB drive. Set it and (mostly) forget it.
Somehow my backup strategy seems have become: buy a new, bigger hard drive every year, copy the entire disc over, and shove the old one in a drawer.
Along with a handful of judicious backups of significant items to Google Drive, it has actually worked very well.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday September 02 2015, @03:13AM
Yup, that's how I do it. I go to the C: folder, copy everything in that folder, then paste all that into a folder called "system image" I have on my USB hard drive. That way I can just copy and paste all that back into the C: drive of my Windows machine if I have to reinstall the OS.
Works like a aisdhgpsdifjga;sdlfagm;sfkgmna;dlfmgsdfj gl;jsdfklg
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Saturday September 05 2015, @04:24PM
I do the same; even upgrading to bigger RAIDs as the situation may be depending on the machine... but google is not a part of that strategy. I did mention my tape strategy earlier, but that came much later than this method.
Google's holding of user content sure is convenient, though, so don't let my ideals interfere with sound reasoning and logic!
I do big backups mostly because I am copying VMs and it can be such a pain to merge snapshots if not managed carefully, and at home, I only have so much care to spread around when a different method may work for me. Managing other things is time consuming as it is.
I also find it hard to actually identify how important to me some things are if they aren't in the super important category. So, if they survive a disk purge, then I back them up. Maybe only once [well, twice... I am not trustworthy of complete dependence on a rarely used alternative system]--no sense backing it up over and over -- but it won't get deleted unless it ends up on an easily accessible platform.
And the missus may categorize something entirely differently (those creative types sometimes value some things that aren't as valuable as far as self-preservation is concerned... other people worry about that, I guess), so I have to deal with different strategies as far as what important means.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday September 05 2015, @09:30PM
Er...you did realize that I was joking, right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @09:27PM
ugh well its hyperturtle posting anonymously because of a brain failure.
But yeah. I haven't been just replacing the raid with bigger drives over the years... I'm going to tape from the raid!
But boot drives can be imaged as well as cloned, and it is easier to rotate a clone or two around to boot from than to try to pull a disk image from tape to a drive that could have had a month old disk image anyway :)
*note, this is for home, not for work, and most people... don't have any solution, even if bad, so I condone, if not applaud, cloning disks even if it sucks for real professional backup purposes. waiting until you replace the drive is not when to back it up. But cloning a working boot volume on a regular basis beats just writing folders to a USB now and then.
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Thursday September 03 2015, @09:58PM
My situation is similar. I buy a new hard drive every once in a while, copy all of the data over, and then put the old one to use doing something. In a couple of years, I may be able to build a pretty nice RAID with all of the drives I have lying around!
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2) by http on Saturday August 29 2015, @02:35AM
If it's not offsite, it's not a backup. rsync, for the win.
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.
(Score: 2, Funny) by manyon on Saturday August 29 2015, @05:02AM
missing option, zip disk! it was good enough for my dad for many years so it's good enough for me
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday August 29 2015, @02:49PM
Yeah, seriously, I have a couple boxes of backup floppies sitting in a closet. Well - a couple boxes of disks, not all backups. I gave up on those when the backup program told me that it would take about 90 disks to complete my backup.
Graduated to optical drives. As time went on, I needed more and more CD's, so I finally bought a DVD burner.
FINALLY, I bought an external hard drive. That was something of a mistake. It's external. People look at it, they seem to think it's some extraneous hardware, and they want to borrow it. Or, they think I keep music and movies on it, so they want to make a copy.
I'm thinking of a RAID. Just connect it to the computer, and I can make all the backups I'll ever need for years to come. I keep looking at the available drives, trying to decide how much to spend.
No, I don't have any off-site backup. I'm to cheap, and none of my stuff is worth the expense anyway.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Monday August 31 2015, @08:03PM
Yes, the disks.
I am about to drop the bucks on a SD card/CF Card/little micro SD card and floppy disk drive extravaganza! Only $11!
Sadly, I have found that the big tower case I have can only host 5.25" drives for show, because modern bioses seem to not support 1.2MB and 360KB floppy options.
I wanted to set my overclocked desktop at 4.77GHz and put it next to my XT running at 4.77MHz and boot off diskettes and complain that things are STILL slow... but no, my plans were ruined.
Interesting thing that I have found is that USB based 1.4MB floppy drives cannot read 720KB diskettes. That really rained on my parade.
I still have diskettes and use them a few times a month. There are situations when it is the only means I have to recover a system or device that I need to recover or reset the password on, and at home... well, they never went out of style!
Besides, they last longer than CDs it seems. I have so many c64 disks that still work.. but the glue on their labels dried out and so now it is like the eternal september of a continuously fading era. The labels fall off like the leaves of a tree... and there will be no renewal or others of their kind to replace them.
A bit dramatic, but I haven't yet backed up all of those old c64 diskettes onto a more solid state format, and probably never will. Once all my disks go bad, I will probably error out myself.
(Score: 1) by bswarm on Tuesday September 01 2015, @05:26PM
I used to use a floppy to back up my Microsoft Money 99 database regularly until... The one time I really needed it because of a hard drive failure, the floppy was corrupt. At no time did any backup say there was a problem with the floppy. Take that as advice if you still use them.
(Score: 1) by SomeGuy on Monday September 07 2015, @02:37AM
If you have actually found a recent motherboard with a real FDC, then for MS-DOS you might be able to use the 2M-XBIOS_version-1.3.zip driver to override your lobotomized bios. Chances are the FDC chip still supports 300kbps and 250kbps low-density operation even if the options have been cut from the bios. Won't help with Windows though. The bigger problem is these boards usually are physically wired up to only operate with ONE floppy drive. Saves the manufactures the expensive costs of running ONE single wire from the FDC chip.
You might also consider a device like the Kryoflux or SuperCard Pro. Although those don't let your read/write files directly.
Actually, some do although many don't. And they never advertise that feature. If they mention they support the Japanese "Mode 3" floppy operation, then they have probably also thrown in 720K support.
Try 3M Super 77 adhesive spray. Excellent for re-attaching labels.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @01:32AM
yesssss!
now, how do I easiest make backup of floppy disks?
I have like 800 of them (many 1.72MB formatted) that wants me to
copy their files onto a dvd ...
are there an easy solution (for linux) that both copy the files with each floppy in its own directory named after the floppys label, and also make an disk image file of it (without having to read the floppy twice), that just beeps when it is time to insert next floppy so I can work on other things and don't have to switch to another window to press a key?
ideally it should make a logfile of which floppies/files that had badsectors (but it should ofcourse still copy the files at its best, and make a disk image), so I could perhaps try read those floppies with some other program or computer later.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Saturday August 29 2015, @04:53PM
Most of my stuff is not important enough to back up. Anything else is under version control, with a repo under my control on a remote server. "git push" is an incredibly easy backup system.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2015, @04:58PM
Just about the only thing I have properly backed up, offline and in more than one geographic location, is my Bitcoin private keys.
It was scary to discover one day that I did not actually have all the keys in two locations. I guess I can claim they are verified now as well (for a weak definition of verified).
I chose paper because it is likely to out-last any other storage medium at my disposal (and is relatively cheap).
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Sunday August 30 2015, @06:47PM
I have many different machines, and they all run the same flavor of Linux. I tend to duplicate my files across all of these machines. I use sftp to copy changes I find as significant between machines.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @09:48PM
I use a USB flashdrive to back up my keepassx and kmymoney data. I use DVDs to back up or archive multimedia. I use an external hard drive to back up my home directory before installing a new version of Gnome Ubuntu. I do NOT use any backup software.
(Score: 3, Funny) by ilPapa on Monday August 31 2015, @01:09AM
I back up using clay tablets. It's slow, but the media lasts a long time. Problem is my garage is just about full from one Excel spreadsheet, my 2003 income taxes and a couple of porno movies from the '70s.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2015, @02:09AM
I encrypt a full disk and back all systems (pc, server, wife's pc, notebook) up to it using ntfsclone. Make two copies, leave with trusted people. In the interim? Just take my chances and shit.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Monday August 31 2015, @10:08AM
I take full backups on an additional internal disk. This way, taking backups is very fast, which means I can do it very frequently and:
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Monday August 31 2015, @06:43PM
Why not a RAID-1, then?
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Tuesday September 01 2015, @10:29AM
Because RAID is not backup! Good luck recovering an accidentally deleted file from a RAID-1. If you're lucky, you might be able to recover it with an undelete program, if one is available for the file system that you use, and the file has not been overwritten. With a recent full backup always at hand, restoring individual lost files is trivial and guaranteed to work.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Friday September 04 2015, @12:58PM
Snapshots on top of a raid running on drbd blocks over a multi site system?
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday September 01 2015, @02:52AM
At work I do full data backup, encrypt it locally, then scp it to a server on the other side of the continent, after which the virtual machine gets shutdown and the virtual disk copied to local NAS device. This all happens automatically every night and then I get an email telling me if it all went well or not.
At home, on occasion I copy my documents folder around to some other computers and rsync it a second disk in my main computer (so if both drives get zapped in the same power spike, I'll lose everything). I really should do something a little more automated at home because any backup that requires human intervention to complete, is basically broken from the get go.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Tuesday September 01 2015, @04:49AM
I have multiple computers with redundant files between them. I make it a habit to copy important files to at least one other computer on a regular basis. I have a few loose harddisks sitting around which have backups of stuff, as well as CDs, DVDs, CF cards, and USB flash chips (and I guess you could say EPROMs and floppy disks, although I don't count those as backups). A few things are also uploaded to my shared hosting webspace.
So far this strategy has worked pretty well. I was talking to one of my old classmates recently about playing games in DOSbox, and he asked if I had any copies of a game he had been writing back in the mid '90s but lost the source code to. I remembered the game he was talking about so I scoured my files and ended up finding three different versions of it.
One thing I did lose, because it was in a .ZIP file which became corrupt, was a Super Soaker DOOM mod I had made. I think I uploaded it to AOL. Anyone out there have SOAKER.WAD? ;)
(Score: 1) by malloc_free on Tuesday September 01 2015, @08:10AM
I'll get that shit back eventually.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday September 01 2015, @04:04PM
Not to bust balls here but judging by the current poll status, people don't really seem to care about their data.
USB drives and NAS aren't good backup devices. Sure they can save you when your main disk dies but what happens when your house burns down or is destroyed by in some disaster? USe a laptop? They are prime targets for theft. I saw the aftermath of hurricane sandy and let me tell you, anything that the water touched was thrown in the trash. I have also known people who lost everything in a house fire. Friend of mine recently had his home burn down to the ground. As in there wasn't anything left as it took firefighters nearly 30 minutes to reach his rural home. By the time they did, it was completely consumed and their concern was preventing it from spreading. That is really scary stuff which will wipe out one or more lifetimes of memories, keepsakes and data in just a few minutes.
I get it that many don't trust cloud storage because of hacking/snooping/spying etc. But ignoring it and thinking your local data is safe is a really bad idea. My advice is to keep local and remote backups. You don't have to remote everything, just the most important and irreplaceable stuff. And if you are paranoid, use your own remote backup scheme using Unix tools like tar, pbzip2, rsync, and custom encryption tied together with a script.
Another decent remote backup idea is to split two NAS devices with a trustworthy friend or relative. You can backup to their device and they can backup to yours while you both make locals to your respective devices. This way you both have two copies, one remote and one local. All you need is encryption and you're all set. They can't read your backup data and you can't read theirs. The only upfront cost is the NAS devices. Then it's simply monthly electric for keeping the units on and internet. Though, you have to monitor and maintain them for disk failures.
(Score: 1) by Cyrano de Maniac on Wednesday September 02 2015, @06:38PM
To be fair to the poll respondents, selecting a backup media as a poll option says nothing about the physical location (onsite vs. offsite) of the backups themselves.
"External USB disk" may well mean "multiple copies thereof, one stored locally and one offsite". Or to flip things around "Cloud" could theoretically mean "My homebrewed cloud implementation sitting in the basement of my house".
While I have slacked recently, in the past I kept a duplicate set of home backup tapes at my work office. If something managed to wipe out both my house and my workplace simultaneously, it's likely Armageddon is nigh and the status of my backups isn't of much concern. Maybe this wouldn't be quite true in a flood, hurricane, or earthquake vulnerable area, or if you're worried about non-geologic timescales, nuclear annihilation, foreign invasion, or extinction-level events, but for my locale and lifespan the "second copy in my desk at work" solution is perfectly sufficient.
(Score: 1) by Cyrano de Maniac on Wednesday September 02 2015, @06:40PM
s/non-//
Dang "spent more time rewording this than writing it" phenomena.
(Score: 1) by Osamabobama on Wednesday September 02 2015, @09:05PM
Also, the poll only allows one choice. I spend more time moving things to my NAS (my response) than I do backing up to the cloud, because much of the cloud backup is automatic, and the NAS requires manual movement of files.
All my photos end up on a Google server, often before I see them. Sometimes, they even get edited for me, probably by a robot. I assume there are also robots watching vacation slide shows, so save my friends and family from having to see them.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday September 01 2015, @09:03PM
Duplicate RAID drive as the working storage, to protect against hard drive falures. The drives are on different disk controllers.
But that's not really backup.
For backup I use two external USB drives. Each contains a full backup. Because if you only have one backup, then when the working storage fails, you have no backups left -- your backup just transmorphed into the vital only copy.
There's a plan to regularly swap drives with a friend, but that hasn't materialized yet.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by dltaylor on Friday September 04 2015, @10:59AM
You back things up religiously, perhaps, but can you restore some semblance of a running system from the backups (with, possibly, install media provide a base system)? If the backups are all just file data, then you can just try to read the files with an appropriate application, and hope the newer versions can read the old version files. This does not always work, however. Some time ago the nice folks at mozilla changed the file formats for Thunderbird/Icedove sufficiently that I could not import them into a newer installation (emacs is a life-saver sometimes).
I want to make some changes to an HTC 510, and HTC has the tools to do it. Immediately as the "ROM" is unlocked, all personal data is erased (according to the documentation). There is a backup program, and I have done it a few times, but I have not yet tested restoring, so I have no idea if the backup have any value, whatsoever. I'm a bit apprehensive about manually re-entering what data is on the phone, in case the restore procedure doesn't work, but I cannot wait much longer to try the restore.
(Score: 4, Touché) by isostatic on Friday September 04 2015, @01:01PM
Back up my important files to /dev/null, it's really fast. I read them from /dev/random.
(Score: 1) by SemperOSS on Saturday September 05 2015, @01:46AM
I have a setup with a Raspberry Pi at my brother's house overseas. I can access the RPi through ssh. My brother has a NAS box installed and I use the RPi as an rsync server to back up my data from all my machines.
I have a similar setup with a friend overseas where I use his servers as a springboard to another NAS box.
To keep the goodwill, I offer similar services to my brother and to my friend so we are happily backing each other up. The biggest problem, currently, is my brother's new Nikon camera — those raw files take an awful lot of bandwidth!
I don't need a signature to draw attention to myself.
Maybe I should add a sarcasm warning now and again?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 06 2015, @01:36AM
The old ways are the best - Real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Tuesday September 08 2015, @05:41AM
For many years, I haven't liked any of the backup programs I've come across for various reasons. I've been collecting notes for possibly writing my own. After I write it, I'd like to open source it. (I have plenty of pages of raw notes that I'd like to type up into cohereant documentation. I've given it a lot of thought over the years.)
I'm not saying that I'll find time to write it. (I'm up to my eyeballs in things to do.) What I'd like to know, though:
Ideas at the 30,000 foot level:
Encryption and compression would probably use third party tools. Not quite sure how I'd make that happen yet. I'm thinking 7zip and a truecrypt variant. Because of some heavier-duty reporting and power-failure protection, I'm thinking about also using PostgreSQL to help me. Obviously, not all details have been fully thought through.
I'd aim to use external drives or NAS for storage. (The documentation would have some heavy "NAS is not a backup" warnings.) I'd like to see how possible it is split files across multiple drives, but I'm not 100% sure yet how I'd do that. (Sure, splitting files onto multiple drives is easy. Splitting deduplicated chunks* of a multi-gigabyte file with multiple versions without swapping out the external drives a bunch of times? That's hard.)
*chunking: When a user edits a file, only the portion of the file that was changed is backed up.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Tuesday September 08 2015, @08:00AM
Gah. Just remembered some other features while I was working out that I thought you might find interesting:
Ok. I'll quit writing. I've spent way too long on writing this stuff. I've talked to other computer people in person, but I haven't found anyone interested in these ideas. I thought I'd throw it to Soylent News and get a reaction from here. Maybe these ideas are past their prime. I dunno.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 08 2015, @07:27AM
I've been working on pricing costs of tape (LTO-x) vs BD-R, particularly with Milleniata now making Blu-Ray M-Discs and not hearing all the bad things about long(er) term BD storage vs DVD+/-R's. For individuals and small businesses, the more worthwhile (outside of true archival) where tape becomes cheaper than BD is totally dependent on how much data you are storing. That is:
BD has cheap and readily available drives and media available everywhere; these drives are universally (not mandated, but I have yet to find one that isn't) backward-compatible with both DVD (-RAM sometimes missing) and CD. HOWEVER, the media is not as cheap as tapes: the cheapest "junk" BD-R's I've seen are around 44 cents a disk or USD$44 for 2.5TB; LTO-6 tapes are about ten bucks cheaper on E-Bay and most retailers. Oh, yeah, and they're still as slow as you remember (subjectively), but at least are random accessible if you don't use "tar".
The cheapest LTO-6 drives I've seen on E-Bay are above $1,600; better condition (or name?) drives approach $3,000. None are readily available at retail, and for SOHO use, you need to add SAS or FC to your computer (not possible on a laptop). Transfer rate blows away hard drives, much less optical drives, so you'll probably have to feed them from SSDs or RAID-0 arrays to keep them from shoe-shining.
OTOH, LTO-6 tapes are the thinnest tapes currently made, and just 3 complete reads or writes (that is, filling up or reading the entire tape at once) eat up most of a tape's official lifetime. If your storage requirements are modest, going LTO-3, which has the thickest tape (and therefore least likely to break and capable of handling much more use), cassettes are half the price of LTO-6 ones or less (for a sixth of the capacity, though), and--here's the kicker--drives are only a couple hundred bucks at most on E-Bay! Many even come with SCSI cards and cables! This is the far cheapest method, but you may need to buy some extra drives since they aren't being made anymore. Oh, and autoloaders are cheap, too, and most can be upgraded to LTO-6 drives if you feel the need.
Not considering LTO-3 (or even -4) because it's so cheap per GB or TB but "dead", nor considering BDXL because, even at less than $15 a disk it is far more expensive than 4 single-layer BD-Rs, the cross-over point between BD-R and LTO-6 is astonishingly low: factoring in the above "junk" disks at $44 per 2.5TB vs a single 2.5TB LTO-6 tape, paying for a $2,000 LTO-6 drive requires saving only 500TB, or 50 of the brand new shingled 10TB hard drives. Surely your p0rn collection is that large.
Meanwhile, the cost of tape goes down over time, but the cost of optical media if you want the good stuff goes up dramatically. Digistor BD-Rs cost $1.24 a disk at this moment, while M-DISC BD-Rs cost is a whopping $4.40 per disk! At THAT cost, 2.5TB is $440 versus a $40 LTO-6 tape (rounding for easy math) means you only have to store a whopping 12.5 TB of data to pay for that tape drive. OTOH, the M-DISC is supposed to be good for a thousand years, even if your optical drive isn't.
Finally, it has been repeatedly said that, for long-term storage, use multiple baskets (media types) in multiple locations for the best chance at long-term survival. This is probably still true today.
I hope this helps someone out there.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Dr Spin on Wednesday September 09 2015, @09:02PM
I have read 30 year old tapes myself. OK, they were not LTO tapes.
Quantum - the biggest LTO supplier, were the people behind DECtape more than 40 years ago.
I cannot read 30 year old H/Ds or most 10 year old CDs. I have considerable difficulty believing that the long life BD stuff will live longer than the company that made the stuff. When the disks start failing, that is the end of the company. And your data.
Lifetime warranty? Yeah I had one on my car battery. When the battery failed the dealer explained "well, it was guaranteed for ITS lifetime, not yours, and now its dead".
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 2) by novak on Thursday September 10 2015, @07:01AM
I can only back up 80GB for now but I hope to get that memory doubler soon.
novak
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2015, @03:30PM
Work files, under few GB are stored at Dropbox, encrypted using encFS.
So, having two desktops and two laptops is quite easy to have all data in sync.
After that, it gets to backup weekly to external hard drives placed on two different location.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Sunday September 13 2015, @03:05AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 12 2015, @04:39AM
And as for longevity, well... You can buy fancy 'archival' grade CDs if you want your files to last 200+ years, but my data isn't that important. In general, if you keep discs out of light and horrible humidity, they'll last a long time. You have to spin up HDDs every couple months (or years, but I've had cheap drives crap out real quick) to keep them healthy, but CDs you can just burn and leave in storage until you need them. And run as many magnets over them as your heart desires.
But, you should always have multiple forms of backup in multiple locations. I generally do Dropbox, optical, and my own server.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 12 2015, @10:23AM
I make the assumption that I am most likely to get zapped with a nasty computer virus and nothing on the host machine can be trusted.
So, I keep a bootable CDROM of CloneZilla and a USB hard drive with the disk image on it.
I can store several images on it as the USB HDD is several times the size of the laptop's HDD.
I figure if worse comes to worse and I get a terminal nailing ( like cryptolocker or something as nasty ), I will just go get a new HDD for the laptop and re-establish the last known good image from the Clonezilla USB image file. That way I still have the intact ( but maybe useless) disk for forensics or post mortem.
Its a bit lengthy because I only do full backups this way. I occasionally do incremental backups of active project folders. However data files only will be trusted in the event of a malware attack... and I mean data files like EAGLE library, schematic, and board files. Maybe some SPICE files.
The only Microsoft file format I consider vandal resistant is a .txt file.
And that only if opened in a non-Microsoft reader.
My older stuff is archived so redundantly that I have little to worry about there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 12 2015, @09:45PM
Rsync nightly to host at work with 3tb disk.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 13 2015, @05:36PM
Tapes are recycled once a week.