My wife and I use Crashplan which has a multiple destination feature. Which means that I backup my files to my wife’s laptop as she does to mine as well as uploading our files to the Crashplan servers. USB or network drive would work as well, we don’t have so we don’t use either.
It’s a great feature that benefits me and Crashplan in the event of a HDD failure on my laptop, I get a faster recovery, they save on bandwidth. But in the event of my house vaporizing, all is not lost.
Acronis TrueImage to perform weekly full and daily incremental full disk backups. On Fridays I swap to another backup drive that I keep offsite. That way I always have a full backup stored offsite, from 0 to 6 days old.
I can restore the backup to another hard drive and the restored drive is fully bootable. If I restore the backup to a drive on the same computer it’s like nothing every changed. If I restore it to a different computer Acronis will revert the Windows hardware drivers back to the generic ones so the restored drive will boot on a different computer.
I will say the Acronis interface has changed for the worse since version 9, but it still works; I verified it yesterday by restoring a Windows 7 64-bit drive to a different computer and it booted just fine and took me back to my desktop with all data intact.
I’m super disorganized. I have hundreds of GB of stuff, but it’s spread out over several computers and thumb drives, random ftps, etc.
Any NAS recommendations?
Several SmartSync Pro profiles to make various backups to other HDDs on the same machine, some every 2 hours and some daily. Daily jobs to version stuff I want versioned.
CrashPlan to the cloud daily.
Actual disk image of the SSD C: drive weekly.
The SmartSync pro jobs also populate a dropbox directory, and make .zip files for offsite physical transfer. Every so often I make a TrueCrypt vault of some of the zips and copy them to a thumb drive I carry on my keychain.
A six-year-old iMac running 10.9.1, using Time Machine and a 500 GB USB drive, though my pix and music files are on two other flash drives, as well.
It’s a home machine, so I don’t need anything fancier.
I started a thread asking about home NAS solutions. I’m leaning towards a Western Digital MyCloud NAS server and a USB external Drive to back that up.
Mac here. Time Machine backup to a terabyte drive, documents to a raid server on the network.
Software: Aomei Backupper (a freeware)&Windows backup tool
Hardware: HDD (cheaper than SSD)
I also Create Bootable Rescue Media
You just grab the gear shift and put it in reverse.
I use Crashplan.
Laptop backs up to desktop and to internet. Desktop backs up one internal drive to another.
Automated copy to home server (server also runs source control software). Server is backed up to Carbonite.
Belt and suspenders approach for me.
TimeCapsule running on my MacBook Air backed up to a WD 1TB portable drive.
All files except music are also syncing with DropBox. My music is kinda backed up by using iTunes with Match turned on.
I’ve got about a dozen text documents and a couple dozen photos that I’d like to keep, so I copy them to a memory stick. Every six months or so, I recopy them, in case some of them are updated.
Time Machine onto an external drive. Additionally, documents I’m currently working on are usually saved to Dropbox.
I use Genie Backup Manager.
Its really good. Highly recommended. It doesn’t just save data files, it also saves settings for various programs, such as my saved emails. It’s got plugins for many popular programs.
It can be automated. I’ve set it to run a differential backuptwice per week. I don’t have to think about it, it just runs in the background, and only takes a few minutes. About once per month I copy the latest backup to an external drive.
It was really useful a couple of months ago. I updated Firefox, and suddenly most of my plugins were incompatible with the latest version. With Genie, I was able to revert to an older version, and it worked again.
Mac. Time Machine once a day, Retrospect to 500 gig drive once a day.
Periodic external clone (SuperDuper!)
Weekly snapshots to NAS. (TimeMachine would be nice, but I am rarely at home with my laptop on long enough to do periodic backups without planning a set time for it, so I use a limited SuperDuper smart backup to a disk image.)
In-progress work is synced to all devices via Dropbox.
Seriously contemplated a belt, suspenders, duct-tape approach using Backblaze but decided I’d rather invest the money I’d pay for a subscription in periodic purchases of drives instead. I never actually finished the initial backup. And yes, I excluded files I could realistically lose without a problem, like ripped music and movies. Still took bloody forever, and never got close to finalized, while taking up a bunch of upstream bandwidth all night every night until I gave up and realized that I was probably never realistically going to be able to upload all of my significant files.
I have an external firewire hard drive, and I have Retrospect, which makes a bootable backup (an exact replica of my internal hard drive volume) every night at 3 AM.
I test the bootable backup periodically.
For offsite backup, I admit I’m not as well set up. Some of my most critically important papers are backed up to an FTP site, but there’s a lot I’d cry about if the house burned down and my computers and backup drives were all destroyed in one fell swoop.
Rotating backups to a couple of portable hard drives, using the free edition of Aomei Backupper. One copy kept offsite at the office (encrypted – actually, all the copies are encrypted because there’s no real reason not to).
My data arrangement predates self-important, self-organizing windows and Apple products.
I used to back up photos and music to DVD; that stopped when I hit 6 discs. now it’s impractical - on my last vacation I generated 30GB of photos. Our music is pushing 40GB and there are a few movies that came as free downloads with the DVDs that I would hate to lose.
Now I have a batch file - copies C:\Music, C:\Photos, C:|Installs, (My) Documents and anything else I think is self-generated and of value. These are copied across to a USB hard disk every few weeks. I also occasionally dump our USB sticks to the disk too. I can keep several copies of the backup sets before I have to erase the older ones. When we go on vacation, I take the USB drive and give it to my in-laws for safe keeping. (Originally this was a 1TB drive, now it’s 3TB.)
Then it’s also a matter of organizing. My photos are arranged in folders by year, going back to 2000 and my first digital photos, plus a series of scanned folders from negatives before that. Within each year, the photos are grouped- i.e. 2003-06NYC Trip, and by day under that. Apple has conveniently rearranged my music to suit the needs of iTunes. Although I backup everything, worst case I re-import everything to a new instance. Playlists can be rebuilt, but songs are harder to re-acquire. Any useful program I download, I put the install program into C:\Installs. Install keys (if applicable) in a file in My Documents.
I don’t expect to restore my computer completely. Generally, it’s not simple to do so to new hardware. It’s just convenient to have the data I want, and the tools to rebuild a computer with the software I want.