Ask HN: How do you Backup your Personal Files?

I have multiple layers of redundancy. This is Mac-centric, but you can do something similar in other operating systems:

* I use a Time Machine to do incremental backups of my system drive which also contains any files that I don't want to lose.

* I periodically make a complete image of all my important drives. I have two copies of this. One copy stays off-site and I never have both at the same location as my originals. The other copy is local but left disconnected. I periodically rotate a copy to the off-site location. I use SuperDuper to make the images.

* I use DropBox for things I am working on and various other important files I want backed up and shared across my computers. This isn't big enough to contain the bulk of my media files (music, photos, video), but anything small enough goes here. A few of my super-important media files I keep here, like my wedding video and photos. I started using DropBox's photo syncing feature for my phone camera and am thinking of using it for all my cameras as well.

* Anything in my DropBox gets backed up by Time Machine as well on two different computers at two different locations.

I think it's really important to have at least two backups in the case that one of them fails. And one of them absolutely should be off site since a burglary, fire, hurricane, etc can potentially take them all out if they are all in the same location.

Also, it should not be possible for a remote attacker to erase all of your backups. For example, if you used a combination of Time Machine and cloud backup, an attacker could potentially gain access to your local machine, do a secure erase of all your drives including your Time Machine backup, and gain access to your online cloud backup and erase that. In a situation like that, you better hope that your cloud backup provider keeps enough backups such that you can recover erased files.

If you want to be even safer it's good to have 3 backups. One local, one off-site, and one off-site in a different city (e.g. Internet backup or shipping your drives somewhere). Now this is considering a severe worse case scenario, but having an off-site backup in the same city isn't enough, because a hurricane or earthquake could potentially damage your drives in both locations.

At the end of each day I run this Allway Sync app that makes both two way and one-way syncs of my folders to an external 320GB Samsung HDD. I don't propagate deletions for my photos and videos, so they accumulate forever. For all the other folders, I propagate deletions and modifications. Every couple of months or so I mirror this daily use external HDD with another one I have just to avoid any risk involving hardware failure.

I have a 6-drive Netgear ReadyNAS Probusiness that is currently at about 3TB. It supports Time Machine, so I backup my 2 Mac Laptops through Time Machine only. I backup my desktops and all my other files on the ReadyNAS. I have UPS on all my desktops and ReadyNAS to prevent any power outages from causing data corruption. This came in handy a few months ago when a tree branch fell and took out my power lines.

I have two 2TB drives that I switch between every couple of months that I backup my ReadyNAS to. Because this data is basically my entire digital life (my photos, documents going back to about 1993, emails, etc), I don't trust a straight file copy, so I wrote my own simple bit-by-bit file comparison program. An engineer at NetApp told me all the horror stories that he's been involved with in terms of hard drive reliability, including things like the hard drive reporting to the OS that it wrote everything correctly, when it fact it didn't, so I've become pretty paranoid. The last thing I want is to make a backup, and then find that what was written on my backup hard drive was corrupt.

I have a couple of 500GB hard drives that contain some older archived data from 3+ years ago, so my older photos and documents have about 4 different copies. The only thing I don't implement, which is probably my biggest weakness, is that I don't store any copies offsite, so if there's a fire, I'm screwed.

Except for database and photos, my data growth has slowed down considerably. I would guess that my database data grows about 100 GB every year (I collect stock quotes every day), and my photos and videos are, on average, 10-20GB. This year was an anomaly because I went on a road trip where I used 2 GoPros to take time lapse photos and videos of the entire road trip, and that data itself is about 100 GB, and 99% of it is useless (and embarrassing).

A firesafe is a great idea, and I might follow your example. Do you know if the temperature inside the firesafe remains low enough so that things like CDs and hard drives don't get corrupt? I know that they work for things like papers, but are they deemed safe enough for electronics?

Mark me down as another vote for Arq ... total set it and forget it setup. Very easy to use and inexpensive option for offsite backups.