Backup startegies/software

Started by Nick, July 06, 2017, 03:25:49 PM

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ntpntpntp

The OP's bottom line question was "So what do others do?", hence you're going to get all sort of answers depending on what hardware, software and desired strategy people have adopted.  This thread stemmed from a discussion about network speeds and NAS drives were mentioned, hence my post about my NAS backup strategy.
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austinbob

Quote from: Railwaygun on July 07, 2017, 08:18:35 AM
What's wrong with Linus?



Oops! Did I say Linus instead of Linux. Naughty me.
Nothing wrong with Linux at all if that's your preference.
Most Linux users tend to be computer literate and understand well how to do such mundane tasks as back up. So posting Linux solutions here is probably preaching to the converted.
Much more helpful to post solutions related to the majority on the Forum. Just my two pennerth.
:beers:
Size matters - especially if you don't have a lot of space - and N gauge is the answer!

Bob Austin

Malc

In the good old days of mainframes, they used to have a three tier backup system. I.e. 3 tapes used in turn with the oldest copy being the next to be overridden. In addition they kept a transaction file which recorded everything that had been input that day. So with the backup tapes and transaction files you could recover everything. A bit extreme these days, so I just use 2Gbyte hard drives in a caddy and Acronis to do the backup. Plus my music and photos are stored on several different NAS and USB drives.
The years have been good to me, it was the weekends that did the damage.

austinbob

I remember all that Malc. We had rooms full of backup tapes and it was quite a task to keep it all under control. Still can't get over the size of those mainframes, especially when you consider how powerful our tiny PCs, tablets and laptops are these days.
:no: :beers:
Size matters - especially if you don't have a lot of space - and N gauge is the answer!

Bob Austin

Nick

I remember 3-2-1. As a humble user, it rather intrigued me why the backup we needed to have restored was always on the tape that had been accidentally overwritten... ;) Personally, I thought things went downhill once they did away with punched tape...

I never intended to set off a OS brushfire conflict... Sorry. It was Windows software I was asking after - I thought my using Windows FileHistory was the clue. :) But I entirely accept that backup strategies are to a large extent platform independent. I can't see me writing my own routines. The last time I coded anything apart from Excel VBA was for the Archimedes RiscOS GUI, and that was in C, well before C# was developed. I've no intention of reviving those skills. I'd rather be modelling.

Thanks for everyone's input, though. It's interesting to see what people are actually doing, rather  than the text book solutions. I think I probably need some amalgam of my own made out of austinbob and ntpntpntp's approaches. Having been burgled many years ago, I am only too well aware of the need for an offsite backup. Unfortunately, lacking an office drawer or any close family nearby, I'm a bit stuck. When we go away, I take my external drive with me, or leave it with some good friends. But I know it freaks them out to be responsible for it, so it's not a permanent arrangement. That's why I like the cloud/OneDrive. I'd never leave anything only there without having my own copy, but having my data professionally curated and accessible from anywhere in the world from any device is handy.

Of course, if Microsoft disappear overnight on the same day my house burns down, I'll be stuffed. But we probably all will be if they do, what with only having three days' food in the supply chain and pretty much every business in the world using their software... I'll spend my time whittling sticks to hunt squirrels in the park, and lamenting my lost photos... :D

Nick

The perfect is the enemy of the good - Voltaire

Buzzard

Being a suspicious sort I too do not use any form of cloud computing for backups.

I have a series of memory sticks for monthly backups of most regularly accessed data e.g. spreadsheets, e-mails.

I have data which I term as "permanent storage" which can be anything from songs to railway accident reports.  This too gets backed up monthly on a series of sticks even though not much changes.

For data that changes most often that gets backed up daily on another couple of sticks.  When I go away from the house for more than an hour the latest stick goes with me.

For photos I simply put the camera chip to one side when full and start a fresh one.

All backups mentioned above, except the daily sticks, are stored away from the house in an animal proof container.

In addition to memory sticks I have an external hard disk that has a copy of everything.  This gets updated every so often.

I also put copies of data onto a laptop and a standalone PC, also on a random basis.

If I really need to go back to something old I have hard disks from now defunct PCs.

For info my PC is running Windows 7 Home Premium and I use a bit of software called Toucan to do the backups.

Mike Hamilton

On my iMac I use Time Machine to back up onto a 2TB USB 3 drive.  This happens automatically every hour.
Every day I use SuperDuper to clone the Mac onto a 2nd 2 TB USB 3 drive.
These two drives are essentially transient stuff (stuff in use).
Emails are IMAP, so I don't really need to bother much with them.
Contacts are in iCloud as are Safari bookmarks.
I then use a QNAP TS-451 with 16TB RAID to store everything else on - documents, photos, work stuff etc.
I have worked in IT for the past 35 years and have always made multiple backups, which are regularly tested as they will fail at the most inconvenient time (but when is a convenient time to fail?).  I can take my Mac, reinstall it's OS, all programs and data in about 20 minutes now.
Personally I wouldn't trust a USB memory stick as far as I could throw one.  They do have an annoying habit of either getting corrupted or lost / misplaced.

"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes" - Oscar Wilde

mickster04

I just use google drive and Dropbox for files. never had a problem.
I don't bother backing up programs or the OS.

I use google suite plenty and have Android so again all my photos are on there too.

If you don't trust the hardware you are running (your laptop etc) to not die, then a local backup is fine, but if you're doing it to prevent against theft or fire, then a NAS is useless...

If I have to buy a new device (laptop/pc) then I would want to install the programs again rather than restore to make sure they are installed right.

That applies to windows.
For my Ubuntu (*nix) setup, I have a different drive for my /home than I do for the rest of the OS, which means I can install an updated version of the OS without losing files, it doesn't protect me from that drive failing, but any files I need are still in Dropbox and google drive.

Malc

For the OS and programmes, I use a hard drive and close the C: drive with Acronis. I do this after adding any new software or updating existing versions.
The years have been good to me, it was the weekends that did the damage.

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