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Ask HN: What's your backup solution?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?

#111
post #48

Github for code and Google Drive for documents & photos. Google photos turned out as the best solution for photo syncing, sharing, simple editing (rotation with keybind) and unlimited free storage of pretty good quality photos. Google documents turned out as the most practical editor (cloud, sharing, all the basic editing commands). I am on the unix systems most of the time and I always find something missing in Page…

I have all kinds of dotfiles I'd hate to recreate from scratch. Mostly application configuration stored in ~/Library or /usr/local.

github works well for dotfiles.

Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?

#112
post #99

CrashPlan. Dirt cheap for unlimited storage for generational backups for 10 machines. Whole extended family fits in one subscription.

I also use Crashplan. For the price it can't be beat. Plus the upload speeds are very fast when compared to someone like iDrive. However be warned, their client is a Java application and the more files and terabytes you want to backup, the more ram it takes. For example, I backup about 3 terabytes on a server and it takes 3+ GB of constant ram usage to do this. https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Troubleshooting/A…

Yes, i wish they made a leaner client. I have a budget NAS with 128mb ram which I have to backup from a client because 128mb isn't enough.

I thought they had fixed this by now.

Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?

#113

CrashPlan. Dirt cheap for unlimited storage for generational backups for 10 machines. Whole extended family fits in one subscription.

Tried restoring from it yet?

/r/datahoarders have a long list of horror stories about that. Admittedly, these guys operate in TBs, but the general feeling on the sub towards CrashPlan is to avoid it at all costs (no pun intended).

Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?

#114
post #109

CrashPlan. Dirt cheap for unlimited storage for generational backups for 10 machines. Whole extended family fits in one subscription.

Please double check if CP really does backup all your files - it doesn't for me (Ubuntu 14.04, haven't checked after upgrading to 16.04 since I've cancelled my account anyway). I suspect it's related to the huge amount of files in average js projects, eventhough i'm now excluding node_modules/ from backing up. I've also spent quite some time with CP support to debug the issue but without any result. Nonetheless, I do…

I must admit I have only done partial restores, but it looks right size wise. I also use Windows CP exclusively so many-small-files and deep hierarchy are basically frowned upon...

If I had that problem I'd include a huge tar of everything in the file set. Or go to backblaze.

Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?

#115
post #25

I use rsync, mostly to backup from LVM snapshots over SSH to either rsync --link-dest snapshots or ZFS snapshots. https://gitlab.paivola.fi/tech/pvl-backup

Do you also keep your zfs snapshots around?

(they're a lot more efficient than lvm snapshots. One machine I use took snapshots every half hour, and we accidentally filled it up with >3000 snapshots before anyone noticed that the reaper script for old snapshots wasn't running :-P . No performance degradation!)

Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?

#116

Arq ( https://www.arqbackup.com ) and AWS. As close to set it and forget it that you can get. Process: - Local TimeMachine backups - Arq backup to AWS Glacier

Note that Arq with Glacier only is usually a mistake (as discovered by the poster below), since restores need to be requested and queued up, and take hours to come back with the results. Restores are also very expensive. As an Arq user who used Glacier previously, I much rather recommend using Google Cloud Storage: * Nearline restore is instantaneous; * Storage per month is >30% cheaper [1]; * Recovering data from GC…

Arq also supports Amazon Cloud Drive as a target, and if you're in the US, it's a flat $60 per year for unlimited storage.

Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?

#118
post #113

CrashPlan. Dirt cheap for unlimited storage for generational backups for 10 machines. Whole extended family fits in one subscription.

Tried restoring from it yet? /r/datahoarders have a long list of horror stories about that. Admittedly, these guys operate in TBs, but the general feeling on the sub towards CrashPlan is to avoid it at all costs (no pun intended).

Yes, it has saved my behind several times.

My requirements are pretty simple: has to work well on windows + mac, has to be cloud based, have decent bandwidth, unlimited storage, unlimited retention, and has to and require no configuration of my own apart from selecting files and schedules.

I just haven't found anything with the level of polish that CrashPlan has in terms of UI and usability. To avoid having all eggs in one basket I try to keep at least a mirror of everything too, e.g. on a NAS.

I have been a DataHoarder kind of guy in the past (dabbled with my own backup scripts, etc.) but found that the chance of user error on my part is probably an order of magnitude greater than the risk of losing data any other way - and with user error there is always the risk that you also bork your backups. So I don't want any system that has any kind of complex configuration on my part.

Further, I don't want to separate the storage from the backup, simply because buying unlimited cloud storage is to expensive. I don't need fast random access storage, I need something cheap like glacier, but that quickly becomes comples. So I'm very happy to hide that complexity behind a cloud backup provider that gives unlimited retention and storage.

Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?

#119
post #113

CrashPlan. Dirt cheap for unlimited storage for generational backups for 10 machines. Whole extended family fits in one subscription.

Tried restoring from it yet? /r/datahoarders have a long list of horror stories about that. Admittedly, these guys operate in TBs, but the general feeling on the sub towards CrashPlan is to avoid it at all costs (no pun intended).

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What's your backup solution?

#120
Backblaze. Set it up and forget about it. I've done a handful of recoveries and it's never failed.

I also have dropbox and sync most of my code to bitbucket/github, but I don't really consider that "backup" even if I can sometimes use it as such.

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