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Ask HN: How do you back up your data?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you back up your data?

#41

Post by josephscott »

cromulent wrote: post #18

This is not answering the question, but someone please build this for me (and hopefully a million others): Simple live off-site backup for worst-case scenario. I buy a pair of devices (e.g. Tonidos) with attached commodity HDDs that I split with a friend. He plugs his into his network, I plug mine in. I dump files to my local device, but they actually get buffered and then stored overnight at his place, and vice-vers…

Space Monkey - http://www.spacemonkey.com/

Takes the distributed backup idea to the n-th degree.

Re: Ask HN: How do you back up your data?

#42

Post by lvillani »

I've got a Synology DS213j [1] with two WD Red 2TB [2] drives in RAID-1. All machines in my house run some sort of Linux, thus they are encrypted and backed up daily with Deja-Dup (which is just a front-end to duplicity [3]).

The Synology has netatalk configured out of the box so it can be seen in the network as an AFP share and can be used as a destination for TimeMachine backups (I'm not using it in that way but a couple of friends who use Macs told me it works well).

It also has a package to backup data stored on the Synology to Amazon Glacier, and that is something I'm going to enable soon in order to improve redundancy (and to have an off-site copy of my data).

On top of that some of that stuff is also spread between Dropbox, Drive, Github and thumb drives. I might have like three to five copies of each file at any given time.

- [1]: http://www.synology.com/products/product.php?product_name=DS...

- [2]: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=810

- [3]: http://duplicity.nongnu.org/

Re: Ask HN: How do you back up your data?

#43

Post by cromulent »

josephscott wrote: post #41
cromulent wrote: post #18

This is not answering the question, but someone please build this for me (and hopefully a million others): Simple live off-site backup for worst-case scenario. I buy a pair of devices (e.g. Tonidos) with attached commodity HDDs that I split with a friend. He plugs his into his network, I plug mine in. I dump files to my local device, but they actually get buffered and then stored overnight at his place, and vice-vers…

Space Monkey - http://www.spacemonkey.com/ Takes the distributed backup idea to the n-th degree.

Interesting, but "All subscriptions come with a device that is owned and managed by Space Monkey".

I'd like to buy something that I own and store where I want.

Re: Ask HN: How do you back up your data?

#44

Post by mchanson »

cromulent wrote: post #38
mchanson wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Crashplan's software will do this without you paying them a sub.

No, it'll back up to other computers with a Crashplan account. I don't want to depend on third parties who may or may not be around, I want to give a drive to a friend and say: Plug this in.

Dunno what to tell you. Perhaps rsync and a dynamic dns approach would be good? IF you want the machines to find each other even through IP changes you need somewhat of them rediscovering each other.

Back up should be a multitiered thing so you don't mind if one goes kaput. That way you can use a 3rd party without 'depending' on them.

Re: Ask HN: How do you back up your data?

#45

Post by OafTobark »

ukd1 wrote: post #14
OafTobark wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been reading up on Backblaze but don't they require you keep a local copy and they only keep history for 30 days before its wiped?

Yes. I use them; the other bad thing you might read about is that to download encrypted stuff, you need to enter your password on their server.

So I'm curious then, given those flaws, why still use Backblaze as it doesn't seem to be a true cloud backup? Would feel more like a cloud Time Machine

Re: Ask HN: How do you back up your data?

#47

Post by alexw1 »

pwg wrote: post #34
alexw1 wrote: post #26

Since both my wife and I use either Mac or Linux based laptops I have a quick and dirty shell script that gets fired off by hand at the end of the day. The script uses rsync and cpio to copy all files in the laptop's home directory onto a machine running debian packed with 4 1TB drives in a RAID5+1 spare configuration. The script uses hard links to keep daily increments without consuming disk space and goes something…

So you have a hand rolled version of rsnapshot?: http://www.rsnapshot.org/

Wow, guess so. I've been using my script for years but I'm not surprised someone else has done this right.

Re: Ask HN: How do you back up your data?

#49

Post by __xtrimsky »

Dropbox. (Google Drive is not stable enough, and I have too many things on Google already)

One mistake I made with Dropbox is installing it on one of my linux servers, on my server I moved Dropbox folder, and it made Dropbox believe that I have deleted everything on my server. So it deleted most of my files, and recovering it was a mess. Even talking after talking with Dropbox support, I couldn't recover everything :(.

Looking for a better solution, but I need the cloud as I want to be able to access some of the files from my phone.

Re: Ask HN: How do you back up your data?

#50

Post by zedpm »

lvillani wrote: post #42

I've got a Synology DS213j [1] with two WD Red 2TB [2] drives in RAID-1. All machines in my house run some sort of Linux, thus they are encrypted and backed up daily with Deja-Dup (which is just a front-end to duplicity [3]). The Synology has netatalk configured out of the box so it can be seen in the network as an AFP share and can be used as a destination for TimeMachine backups (I'm not using it in that way but a…

Yep, the Diskstations are super slick appliances. I'm also planning on using my Diskstation's offsite backup support, though I'm not sure if I'll be uploading to S3, Glacier, or Rsync.net. In the mean time I've plugged a Fantom external HDD[1] into my Diskstation and have set it to run backups there.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004IYJX20/ref=oh_details_o...

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