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How do you backup your data at home?
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
No animal should ever jump on the dining room furniture unless
absolutely certain he can hold his own in conversation.
-- Fran Lebowitz
(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.