Ask HN: How do you Backup your Personal Files?

#1

Post by davidbrent » Fri, Aug 10, 2012, 12:51 PM UTC

Call me a child of the American media's fear tactics, but this well publicized story of Matt Honan's hack has me questioning my backup techniques of personal files (pictures, music, important family legal docs, tax data, etc...).

Currently I have one hard drive on my home Windows 7 desktop machine, with dropbox sync setup to mirror certain folders and then I use Google Drive for most of my pictures and media sorts. Now I am thinking I need a local option, something fully under my control (and unfortunately my responsibility).

With so many options out there, I wanted to see what the users of Hacker News were doing with their personal files, outside of the plethora of cloud solutions. Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: How do you Backup your Personal Files?

#2

Post by tjosten » Fri, Aug 10, 2012, 12:55 PM UTC

Apple Time Machine and two external 2 TB hard drives for the iMac. Additionally, a daily backup backup of my Macbook Air to a 128 GB USB flash drive, which I copy over to the external hard drives once a week.

Re: Ask HN: How do you Backup your Personal Files?

#3

Post by skram » Fri, Aug 10, 2012, 1:01 PM UTC

My first line of defense: Dropbox

I also have CrashPlan running in the background but hardly ever have to use it

I have an Apple Time Capsule as well but, like CrashPlan, I try not to have to use it and it's more of a worst case scenario backup.

Dropbox all the way.

Re: Ask HN: How do you Backup your Personal Files?

#4

Post by jfaucett » Fri, Aug 10, 2012, 1:05 PM UTC

rsync cronjob to my external 8TB :)

Re: Ask HN: How do you Backup your Personal Files?

#5

Post by forkrulassail » Fri, Aug 10, 2012, 1:21 PM UTC

rsync to RAID 5 externals.

Crashplan running in background.

Google Drive for Docs and working files.

Github & other git services for projects.

Re: Ask HN: How do you Backup your Personal Files?

#6

Post by tjic » Fri, Aug 10, 2012, 1:23 PM UTC

I have a cheap box at a webhosting company with ssh access.

I use svn over ssh and check in all of my person stuff there.

This is really nice because I can share linux dotfiles, etc. between my work and home machines.

Re: Ask HN: How do you Backup your Personal Files?

#7

Post by sidmitra » Fri, Aug 10, 2012, 1:24 PM UTC

* Crashplan, family plan that has unlimited backup for 5$/mnth

* Drobo FS for local backup, can go upto 5 HDDs as RAID.

Re: Ask HN: How do you Backup your Personal Files?

#8

Post by EdwardCoffin » Fri, Aug 10, 2012, 1:27 PM UTC

tjosten wrote: post #2

Apple Time Machine and two external 2 TB hard drives for the iMac. Additionally, a daily backup backup of my Macbook Air to a 128 GB USB flash drive, which I copy over to the external hard drives once a week.

Mine is similar: Time Machine all the time, and a periodic drive image using Super Duper to one of two external (actually enclosure-less internal) drives, one of which is always offsite.

Re: Ask HN: How do you Backup your Personal Files?

#9

Post by josephagoss » Fri, Aug 10, 2012, 1:28 PM UTC

Over 400GB backup on external and crashplan, these include all my personal files and photos throughout my life.

Re: Ask HN: How do you Backup your Personal Files?

#10

Post by pitzips » Fri, Aug 10, 2012, 1:33 PM UTC

- Dropbox for documents and archived log files.

- Photos and videos are backed up to a truecrypt drive manually using FreeFileSync twice a week or so.

- Backblaze running constantly.

- Pogoplug (+1 external drive attached) offsite at my parents house with archlinux installed. Eventually I'll attach another drive and have rsync mirroring them using a cron job.