41–50 of 156 posts
On my work desktop I also do incremental Acronis images and Windows File History on local drives.
Praying and LVM RAID1.
Nowadays: most important stuff, rsync.net, more than a bit expensive at 20 cents/GB/month, but their many other virtues and especially simplicity make up for it, including support of private git repoes. currently $9.60/month, that's a grandfathered price in that now the minimum you start with is larger.
Saved my email repository and a fair amount else when the Joplin 2011 tornado trashed the machine that it was on as well as my BackupPC discs which were in another room that suffered the only wall breach (my main system came through fine, and that near miss of losing everything else prompted me to start using tape again, LTO-4 was capacious and cheap enough by then, I'd long outgrown DAT).
Most of most important stuff with BackupPC to a 1GB USB 3.0 drive (would be all to a bigger drive, and will be when the next item changes state, but I'm economizing now).
Since my 2 2TB bulk drives are all over 5 years old now, they're getting nightly rsynced to a new 4 TB drive on my other system, which when one of them fails will physically replace both of them.
Backstopping all of that, a LTO-4 tape drive on my other system, tar incrementals every night, those tapes cycled every week from a pool of 5, then full backups every month, which are put off-site sometime during the month.
Now that I've got a serious Internet connection, if I was starting over, and didn't have the sunk costs of the LTO-4 tape drive system (drive, SAS controller, fast disk to feed it) and plenty of tapes, I'd probably do this level of backup to the cloud at a fairly raw level to S3, Glacier, GCS, or Backblaze.
My main backup is a local harddrive formatted with btrfs. I have a script in cron.daily that runs rsync then makes a btrfs snapshot.
In addition to that, I run crashplan to back up my computer to the cloud. In some sense, this is actually my main backup because I trust them far more than I trust my own backup system, but it is not as convenient to restore from than a local drive (but still quiete convenient).
I also keep have a two small hard-drives in a safety deposit box. These drives are exact mirrors of each other and tested/updated once a year.
I use Synology. I simply love it. I have RAID 6 which cuts down on the space I can use, but it gives me the peace of mind that I need, especially after one of my drives already died and I had to get it replaced. With RAID 6, I had no impact in speed whatsoever and 2 more drives would have to fail before I lost anything. Thanks to Amazon, I can get a new drive next day, so the chance of data loss is relatively small.
I also have an external USB connected to it that I will occasionally do full backups, every few months (my data doesn't change a huge amount).
Using a Synology plugin, I upload all my pics, encrypted, to Amazon Cloud for $60/year. I'm still figuring out if it's worth it to expand this to all my data, given that I don't completely trust how secure this is, and what it would look like if I did suffer a catastrophic data loss. I'm limited by time though.
I don't really have anything else to backup. What do you guys have on your systems to require complete system backup?
Github for my contracts. My music collection sits on a server hooked up to my stereo. I had the disks in RAID-Z1, but when one of the disks pulled a Seagate I accidentally made the disks striped vedvs. To back this up, I boot up a rackmount server with larger disks in RAID-Z1 and use rsync. This is the only data that I really care about preserving. I found this out through changing my operating system a lot and havin…
just a reminder, there is a lot more to back up than your hard-drive.