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Ask HN: What service do you use for personal file backup?

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Re: Ask HN: What service do you use for personal file backup?

#15
post #4

I use dropbox for everything. I can't imagine a better solution.

I also use dropbox. Its fantastic for sharing. But to me its not a real backup solution. Everything doesnt live in the same folders or drives, seems like a lot of work to turn dropbox into a half baked backup solution.

You can start by moving things into Dropbox and symlinking them back to their original locations. Can't help you if you're on Windows.

Re: Ask HN: What service do you use for personal file backup?

#17
Time Machine on mac, Back in Time on Linux. Both are great. I backup to a network drive. If you are using a mac, and you want to use time machine, don't waste your money on their time capsule product. To find out how to use time machine with a non-apple backup resource, look into sparse bundles.

Re: Ask HN: What service do you use for personal file backup?

#18
I make bootable clones of my laptop hdd with SuperDuper. I use 2 drives and an external SCSI drive enclosure for this. This way, I have a weekly copy and a daily copy. And when my laptop hdd fails I can switch over to a good copy with no downtime.

I also use Dropbox for a certain subset of my documents, so that adds another layer of backups w/ partial rollback as well.

Online backups are good, but an external SCSI enclosure costs at most $40 + the cost of an internal drive, which is cheaper, and allows faster recovery.

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