31–40 of 56 posts
I know you are looking for a non-cloud option, but Tarsnap (an excellent service by HN's cperciva - http://www.tarsnap.com/ ) is impervious to the sort of issues raised by Matt Honan's hack, as long as you properly secure your private keys. Of course it is still susceptible to the other weaknesses presented by the cloud, which is why I also use an rsync'd external drive.
It's not complete enough that I could wipe my root partition, restore the backup and start running again, but I'm not going to lose anything important if my laptop gets stolen.
I don't use cloud backups, mostly out of laziness. (I would have to think about what is actually worth backing up, and organise things so that it's easy to back those things up and not other things.)
1. back my Mac up with Time Machine;
2. do a weekly Carbon Copy Cloner dd of my disk;
3. keep copies of my data (documents, music, photos) on Dropbox.
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…
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.
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?
Photos and documents (basically small stuff) -> rsync.net every day.
Large stuff (music, video) -> external USB disk.
rsync cronjob to my external 8TB :)
I actually had a (mostly full) 2TB drive go south just the other week and I was able to pull it out and replace it without any data loss. The rest of the grid was even still available while I replaced the drive. I put a new drive in, made a new Tahoe node on it, brought that node into the grid, then ran a "tahoe deep-check --repair" and it repaired and rebalanced all the files that had had shares on the broken drive.
My source code is vitally important, but small. I use git so I just always maintain a couple repos. Generally one on my workstation, one on our office git server, one on github, and there might be copies on my laptop, home machine, and a personal Rackspace server.
For my personal websites, I have a cron job that dumps data out nightly and drops it into Tahoe.