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Ask HN: How do you Backup your Personal Files?

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

#21

Post by joelrunyon »

elektronaut wrote: post #19

First line of defense is a Time Machine backup to a 1TB drive connected to an Airport Extreme. No-brainer if you're on a Mac, in my opinion. Tip: excluding my Chrome profile from the backups reduced the size of most backups by an order of magnitude. Second, CrashPlan. It's the only decent solution I could find with support for backing up network drives without being prohibitively expensive for large amounts of data.…

I tried crashplan on my macbook air. The big thing I'm noticing right now is it takes freaking forever to do the initial backup. I'm really hoping that subsequent backups don't take nearly as long.

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

#24

Post by yoda_sl »

elektronaut wrote: post #19

First line of defense is a Time Machine backup to a 1TB drive connected to an Airport Extreme. No-brainer if you're on a Mac, in my opinion. Tip: excluding my Chrome profile from the backups reduced the size of most backups by an order of magnitude. Second, CrashPlan. It's the only decent solution I could find with support for backing up network drives without being prohibitively expensive for large amounts of data.…

I have almost the same setup as you, except for the mail system: I am just using either GMail or iCloud server for that. TimeMachine and CrashPlan work really well and do their job totally in background without any visible impact on my work. I really like CrashPlan and went initially for a 3 years unlimited plan: you can get a really good deal usually around black Friday where they drop their yearly unlimited prices.

All my macs are now setup with CrashPlan.

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

#26

Post by DanBC »

I have some items that I would not like to lose - photographs of my son.

These are copied to multiple machines, in different houses. They are uploaded to 2 different providers (facebook (natch) and dropbox.)

I also create rars with par2 redundancy data and burn them to good quality CDs which are stored in tyvek sleeves in a firesafe.

That's perhaps a bit over the top, but I really don't want to lose those photos.

Passwords and serial numbers are printed out and kept in the firesafe. That's perhaps a bit insecure, and I need to arrange an "in case of death" list.

Everything else used to be rsynced to a different machine in the same house, but now it's time machined.

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

#27

Post by yoda_sl »

joelrunyon wrote: post #21
elektronaut wrote: post #19

First line of defense is a Time Machine backup to a 1TB drive connected to an Airport Extreme. No-brainer if you're on a Mac, in my opinion. Tip: excluding my Chrome profile from the backups reduced the size of most backups by an order of magnitude. Second, CrashPlan. It's the only decent solution I could find with support for backing up network drives without being prohibitively expensive for large amounts of data.…

I tried crashplan on my macbook air. The big thing I'm noticing right now is it takes freaking forever to do the initial backup. I'm really hoping that subsequent backups don't take nearly as long.

The initial backup can be long yes... I usually leave my Mac always ON for a couple days when that initial backup is happening. After that first backup is done all the others are incremental and usually fast... Unless of course you just created a multi gigabytes movies that need backup.

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

#28

Post by gcv »

Arq backup works great. It does encrypted incremental snapshot backups to your personal S3 account (unlike most services which hold your backups hostage). It has an open-source recovery program. It has a documented format.

For local backups, I use a poor-man's Time Machine — rsync with hard links. It's how Time Machine works under the hood anyway, and I used it long before Apple baked it into the OS. Works great.

The OP uses Windows, though, so I honestly have no idea what equivalents to these options exist which would work with, e.g., NTFS.

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

#30

Post by andrewaylett »

mhenr18 wrote: post #20

I just keep everything I care about in my Dropbox. I use enough machines on a day-to-day basis that this leaves me with a decent local redundancy, and having it all on Dropbox means that I'll have access to it even if all of my machines go down at once.

I fear Dropbox may be more like RAID than like backup: what happens when a file is deleted, causing it to be removed from all of your redundant machines?
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