Ask HN: How do you back up your data?

# Principles

Back up everything. Preferably to the cloud and to a local disk. Automatically.

You should test restores, but you probably wont. Have two independent backup methods for every piece of data.

You should be able to be up and running to last day's backup within an hour or so.

# Personal

CrashPlan: I want to backup every version of every file on my local computer to a local disk and cloud storage.

SuperDuper: I also want to have bootable nightly images of my machine in case I need to restore immediately.

CloudPull: I want to have a local copy of any Google file I have (Docs, Gmail, Calendar)

IFTTT to DropBox: And whenever possible, I want to have a copy of any other cloud-based service (e.g., Instagram)

# Servers

Linode Backup: Turnkey and presumably the Linode folks are smarter than I am.

Duplicity to S3: In case Linode folks aren't that smart, I will have nightly backups of everything.

That is not a backup, that's an external storage. A backup should only be accessed to sync data (preferably with versioning, so the old data is not overwritten) and to recover lost data.

My computers are synchronized with a home server that has mirrored disks, then the home server is backed up to cloud and to my parent's desktop (off-site backup). The backed up data has ~2TB (mainly photos, private git repository, documents).

I use CrashPlan for the cloud and off-site synchronization. With a free account you can backup data to another computer (yours or a friend's). With a paid account you can backup to their cloud storage and you can get more things to tweak. You can provide your own encryption keys, so the data should be safer (as long as you don't loose the private key). The best thing is that it offers file versioning (even with a free account, but you don't get some of the advanced settings for that), so if something really bad happens - like a ransomware virus, that encrypts your files - you can still recover the older version. The only issue is that the application needs Internet access even when using it locally - so if something happens to your account, or you don't have Internet access, you cannot easily[1] access your data.

[1] http://crashplan.probackup.nl/remote-backup/support/q/how-to...

  # rotate daily backups
  ssh -i $SSHKEY -q $BACKUPHOST rm -rf $BASEDIR/home.3
  ssh -i $SSHKEY -q $BACKUPHOST mv $BASEDIR/home.2 $BASEDIR/home.3
  ssh -i $SSHKEY -q $BACKUPHOST mv $BASEDIR/home.1 $BASEDIR/home.2
  ssh -i $SSHKEY -q $BACKUPHOST \
  "(cd $BASEDIR/home.0 && find . -print | cpio -dplm $BASEDIR/home.1)"

  # backup
  TMPFILE=`mktemp /tmp/excludeXXXXXXXX`
  cat  $TMPFILE
  quota.user
  .cache
  EOF

  rsync -Lazv -e "ssh -i $SSHKEY" --update --delete \
  --exclude-from=$TMPFILE $HOME $BACKUPHOST:$BASEDIR/home.0

  rm $TMPFILE