Ask HN: What do you use to backup your data? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to backup your data?

#11

Post by tensafefrogs » Tue, May 10, 2011, 1:45 PM UTC

- Email, contacts, calendar, etc. live in Google apps.

- Photos (raw files), Music, old docs live on my Mac Mini "server" on an external drive, and get backed up via Time Machine to a 2nd external drive (to guard against single drive failure). I also use Backblaze as an off-site backup on my laptop + mini.

I was using Mozy as offsite backup, but since they recently changed their pricing, the cost went from $50/year to about $800/year so I switched to backblaze. We'll see how long they last at their lower prices...

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to backup your data?

#12

Post by wmain » Tue, May 10, 2011, 1:47 PM UTC

I used to use carbonite (http://carbonite.com) but that does not back up external drives. I've since switched to Humyo (http://humyo.com)of external storage I need backed up to the cloud. A nice feature of using cloud storage is I can access all of my data anywhere I have an internet connection.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to backup your data?

#13

Post by JeremyStein » Tue, May 10, 2011, 1:48 PM UTC

rsnapshot. It uses rsync to be fast. It creates directories with full snapshots of my backed-up files and uses hard-links to avoid duplicating files that haven't changed.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to backup your data?

#14

Post by berkes » Tue, May 10, 2011, 1:52 PM UTC

nodata wrote: post #6

deja-dup.

Deja-dup too. To both Amazon s3 and to a terabyte USB HDD.

All data for a finished project goes to /dev/null and as tarball on (several) DVDs.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to backup your data?

#15

Post by bcl » Tue, May 10, 2011, 1:59 PM UTC

rcthompson wrote: post #9

I have BackupPC running on Linux on a headless PC in my laundry room. It does daily incremental backups (file-level dedup) of itself and my laptop over ssh. The important part, as with most systems, is that after the setup process it works with no intervention on my part.

Err, hello clone? Self from alternate dimension? Don't forget to tell them that it runs on top of a software RAID5 and that pooling and compression performance is so excellent that we're stuffing about 2T of data onto 750G of disk. Also that the dryer lint doesn't seem to have any kind of detrimental effect on the computers.

BTW, don't forget that the wife wants the laundry done tonight.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to backup your data?

#16

Post by michaelcampbell » Tue, May 10, 2011, 1:59 PM UTC

For work I run Windows 7, but do my work in an Ubuntu virtualbox. That file I backup locally, to a connected USB drive, and to a NAS. The OS I don't backup at all since everything I need data-wise is on a corporate server.

For my personal stuff, I have a mixture of a large media library, and my wife's business files. The entire system gets backed up nightly (via rsync) to a primary terabyte USB drive. And then I back it up again to a different secondary terabyte USB drive. The business files (her accounting data, website source code, etc.) are additionally backed up to an offsite cloud backup service.

Every year I buy a new terabyte drive and make it the new primary backup drive. The old primary backup drive becomes the new secondary backup drive. The old secondary backup drive gets DBAN'd and sold on ebay. That way my primary backup drive hardware is never more than a year old, and secondary never more than 2.

My media library backups run the risk of a local disaster; fire, etc. But I can afford to lose all that and just be sad about it, but no big financial loss. My wife's business stuff is backed up locally + offsite for obvious reasons.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to backup your data?

#17

Post by _debug_ » Tue, May 10, 2011, 1:59 PM UTC

Desktop OS : Windows XP. Casper to clone the C drive (OS). xxcopy to make a backup of D drive (data). svn repository on the desktop PC.

Some apps such as OneNote sync themselves between my laptop (Windows 7) and desktop PC (XP).

For others, such as Firefox Scrapbook, I run a manual rsync (on cygwin) running via an ssh tunnel. svn and remote desktop access, too, are via the ssh tunnel.

No DropBox, no Microsoft SkyDrive.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to backup your data?

#18

Post by andymoe » Tue, May 10, 2011, 2:00 PM UTC

For my laptop (OSX) I use CrashPlan plus[1] for minute to minute backups of my entire home folder where all my data lives. I also use Dropbox but that's more for collaboration than backup. I occasionally boot with up with my OSX CD and use Disk Utility to do a complete disk clone of my solid state laptop drive onto the original factory 2.5" DeathStar drive. My projects live in git and are pushed to GitHub and Email and contacts live at google and sync to my iPhone via their active sync implementation.

For my windows machines I used to use Mozy but it does not stay out of the way as well as CrashPlan so if I cared at all about what was on my windows computers anymore I would probably use CrashPlan there as well.

[1] http://www.crashplan.com/consumer/crashplan-plus.html

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to backup your data?

#19

Post by tagawa » Tue, May 10, 2011, 2:00 PM UTC

berkes wrote: post #14

nodata wrote: post #6

deja-dup.

Deja-dup too. To both Amazon s3 and to a terabyte USB HDD. All data for a finished project goes to /dev/null and as tarball on (several) DVDs.

Was just looking into Deja Dup yesterday as a better alternative to copy/paste. If it's good enough for you two...

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to backup your data?

#20

Post by yoda_sl » Tue, May 10, 2011, 2:01 PM UTC

Like many other folks I am on a Mac, so I have a Time Machine with 1 TB for local backup and I use CrashPlan family plan purchased around XMas when they were offering a really cool discount and got 3 years paid for. I really like CrashPlan: it took a while for the initial backup on my iMac but after a few weeks all my data have been backed up. CrashPlan is now installed on all the mac in my household (wife MacBook Pro and her business iMac). I had at one time to restore a few files for my wife's iMac and everything went smoothly so quite happy with the service.

I use DropBox too but I don't consider it as a backup solution rather a file sync solution.