Ask HN: What do you use to backup your data? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to backup your data?

#31

Post by rlpb » Tue, May 10, 2011, 3:08 PM UTC

tarsnap for important stuff, local external disk for my entire machine (for fast recovery). I keep a copy of my tarsnap key in a different city. My local external disk is de-duplicated with ddar (I wrote ddar).

A bunch of scripts run before the tarsnap to pull in external data such as offlineimap for all my IMAP accounts (including Gmail) and a database dump from my blog.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to backup your data?

#32

Post by VladimirGolovin » Tue, May 10, 2011, 3:21 PM UTC

Dropbox + Backblaze.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to backup your data?

#33

Post by alnbayna » Tue, May 10, 2011, 3:26 PM UTC

For contacts, email, calendar I just use the google cloud. For works in progress not on FTP or GIT, I use dropbox. I had a raid array fail on the controller, so I only do incremental backups now. I have a duplicate sized hard drive for every hard drive I need backed up. For my mac, I use superduper and for my pc / linux machines I use clonezilla which does an excellent job. The downside with clonezilla is that it is an OS so you need to have some downtime before you backup. The good side is that it backs up entire disks regardless of the operating system / partitioning / etc.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to backup your data?

#34

Post by bitsm » Tue, May 10, 2011, 3:57 PM UTC

On Mac at home, SuperDuper for bootable backup, plus TimeMachine, to a 2TB dual disk external with drives mirrored via RAID.

SuperDuper is great. Having a bootable backup is awesome when things go wrong. The RAID gives me some peace since I can't afford to lose this data. Backing up the backup online somewhere is my next step, I think.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to backup your data?

#35

Post by nametoremember » Tue, May 10, 2011, 4:02 PM UTC

Nothing. I live dangerously.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to backup your data?

#36

Post by orijing » Tue, May 10, 2011, 4:41 PM UTC

All of my documents (presentations, Word documents, etc) sit on Dropbox. Most of my photos are also on Dropbox, Facebook or Picasa. I have some music files on Amazon Cloud Drive (although a lot of my files are WMAs...). Some code is on Github; but they are also all on Dropbox.

Otherwise I do a full-hard drive back up onto an external hard drive about once a week, so it makes an entire image.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to backup your data?

#37

Post by zepolen » Tue, May 10, 2011, 4:42 PM UTC

tensafefrogs wrote: post #11

- Email, contacts, calendar, etc. live in Google apps. - Photos (raw files), Music, old docs live on my Mac Mini "server" on an external drive, and get backed up via Time Machine to a 2nd external drive (to guard against single drive failure). I also use Backblaze as an off-site backup on my laptop + mini. I was using Mozy as offsite backup, but since they recently changed their pricing, the cost went from $50/year t…

How do you backup the stuff in Google apps? If eg. Google loses your data.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to backup your data?

#38

Post by freerobby » Tue, May 10, 2011, 5:26 PM UTC

My MBP has a 120 GB solid state drive and a 1 TB media drive. I partitioned 120GB from the media drive to do Carbon Copy clones so that it has self-contained redundancy.

I do incremental backups on demand with Time Machine.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to backup your data?

#39

Post by bradleyland » Tue, May 10, 2011, 6:08 PM UTC

Three tier:

Off-site (everything): Backblaze

Off-site (small dataset immediate): Dropbox

On-site (everything): TimeMachine

I'm always kind of surprised at the number of people who have issues with TimeMachine. I've been using it since it came out, and have used it through two machine migrations and one failed hard drive. It's worked flawlessly every time.

Backblaze is configured to back up the same data as TimeMachine. I move important projects (current work) in to a Dropbox folder so that items sync there as well. Having this small, focused dataset means that I don't have to wait on a more general dataset backup to finish before my current work gets synced somewhere off-site.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to backup your data?

#40

Post by double122 » Tue, May 10, 2011, 11:13 PM UTC

For Linux backups, you might be interested in this article, if you haven't already read it:

http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

The combination of cron, rsync and hardlinks, makes for incremental backups with versioning and minimal storage space, all over ssh.